Two enterprising business graduates have harnessed the power of social media to advertise and grow their cleaning business, Makagroup Ltd.

Brothers John and James Makanjuola, identical twins aged 23, business management graduates from Portsmouth and Bournemouth universities respectively, decided to form a cleaning company offering cleaning services to students.

For this John this made commercial sense “as students are always dirty,” he said.

However, the uptake from grubby undergraduates was unsuccessful as John discovered “students don’t care about being dirty and are reluctant to pay”.

Undaunted, the brothers decided to advertise their cleaning services via social media, mainly Tik Tok and Instagram.

The brothers unique selling point are their free clean ups of litter strewn alley ways, overgrown gardens and squalid public toilets which they post online.

John said: “The publicity through Tik Tok has been a key driver in advertising our services and reaching our customers. They love it.”

The young entrepreneur’s comments were justified as two Tik-Tok videos had received 1.5m and 2.1m views.

Their filming does not go unrewarded as the brothers receive passive income from Tik Tok based on the number of views per video, although commission paid tapers off the more views a reel receives.

John could see the commercial sense behind this as “otherwise TikTok would go bust,” he said.

The brothers have attracted mentors such as Simon Quibb, founder of HelpBnk (sic) and a private investor, to advise them on growing their business.

Although the advisors haven’t injected capital into the firm, John said their advice has been welcome, especially on employing staff and tax compliance.

Current turnover is between £4,000 to £5,000 a month but the duo have ambitious targets to grow the brand and achieve monthly sales of £50,000 by the end 2026.

They hope to secure more residential and commercial cleaning contracts which will provide recurring fee income.