How to take your social media global

There’s no denying the impact social media can have on your business.

According to this infographic by CeBit, a whopping 74% of customers rely on social media to influence their buying decisions. But what if your customers don’t speak the same language as you? Thankfully, it’s easier than ever to embrace multilingual social media. You might want to go it alone, or you might choose to get some help from a translation agency – UK based or abroad. Whatever you do, we’ve compiled a few tips and tricks to help you along the way. The first step to global social media success is to start small and carefully choose your audience. If you already do business overseas, then this one might be easy – simply pick your largest foreign-language audience.

Localize, localize, localize!

It’s important to localize content you want to translate. Simply translating anything and everything that you would broadcast to a local audience probably isn’t going to cut it. Ditch any updates that are irrelevant, location or culture-specific. Take the time to carefully craft and adapt your updates to each audience. Our in-country linguists live and breathe their native language – they can help you instantly to localize and get to the hearts of your customers.

Open different accounts

When you finally decide to take the plunge and translate your social media updates, make sure you open separate accounts for each language. Suddenly broadcasting your brand in multiple languages is a sure-fire way to instantly alienate your audience. If they can’t understand what you’re saying, they’re going to click on the dreaded ‘Unfollow’ button. A quick search on Twitter for multinational drinks giant, Coca-Cola, reveals dozens and dozens of separate Twitter feeds for each country (we lost count at 38). While you might not have either the need or the cash to branch out to this extent, start small. Opening a social media account is free, after all, so you can experiment with no huge risk.

Choose the right medium

It’s all well and good being able to speak to your audience in their language, but you’ve got to make sure they’re actually listening. While it might seem the obvious route to choose the big contenders like Facebook or Twitter, these simply aren’t as popular in other countries. Take Twitter, for example – in 2013, its number of Chinese Tweets amounted to only 0.05% of all output, but there are over 1 billion Chinese speakers in the world. Where are they all? Well, that one’s easy. They’re all hanging out on microblogging site, Sina Weibo, which boasts 500 million Chinese-speaking users and 100 million messages per day. If you’re not sure where to start, just speak to our translation agency – UK to Ukraine, we know the most popular spots on the web.

Interact and engage

Ultimately, never forget the ‘social’ part of social media. Engagement and interaction with your audience is essential if your multilingual marketing strategies are to pay off. Tweet back, start a debate, run a competition – do whatever it takes to talk with your followers, but above all, speak to them in their own language and you’ll soon be reaping the benefits. To chat to us about marketing translation or going global with your social media, Contact us today.