A recent study sponsored by the Social Media Success Summit suggested that 88% of businesses were using social media networks for marketing with the most commonly used platforms being Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
Econsultancy’s 2010 Social Media and Online PR Report also reported that 83% of marketers are planning to increase their spending on social media next year, yet only 26% have plans to run campaigns in more than one country. This is perhaps surprising when you consider the fact that localisation has a proven return on investment (with Common Sense Advisory studies suggesting an average return of US $25 for every $1 spent) and the prevalence of non-English language social media platforms worldwide.
Targeting foreign markets with social media campaigns is easier then you might think – here are some tips on how to go about it.
Research the popular sites
The biggest social media names in the western world – sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace – are also global brands. Twitter has enjoyed a recent surge in usage in Latin America for example, and Facebook is the single most visited social media site worldwide, but their dominance is far from complete. Facebook has been intermittently banned in China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and local competitors rule the roost within certain markets.
China’s vast market is dominated by Qzone and Renren. Qzone alone claims to have 380 million users and, while many of these could well be dormant accounts, it’s still a staggering figure. Renren, meanwhile, has a similar interface to Facebook and is popular amongst Chinese students.
Both Twitter and Facebook might be on the rise in the huge emerging markets of Latin America but the most popular site in Brazil – by far the biggest and most populous south American country – is Orkut. Originally hosted in California and still boasting modest levels of usage within the US, Orkut is now hosted within Brazil itself and gets the vast majority of its traffic from there and from India.
Issues of translation
Once you’ve identified the most useful sites to target, you’ll have to consider translation. Machine translation tools are available and are sometimes even built into the social media sites themselves, but even the best automatic translation system lacks human sophistication and can throw up mistakes – this can give your tweets, blogs and other posts an amateurish feel.
Unless you’re a multinational company boasting employees from many different cultures you’ll probably need to look at employing native speaking translators from your target markets. This can be expensive, however, so it may come down to identifying a few select markets that would give you the most benefit and focussing your efforts there.
Native speaking translators will also help you to achieve the right tone for your audience – should it be casual or formal, jovial or serious? Your one big advantage is that by working across languages you can create one piece of content and then have it translated (and properly localised by your translators) for several languages and social media sites – then it’s a simple matter of posting across all your sites and monitoring replies using machine translation software to get the gist.
It may seem daunting to start moving your social media campaigns into foreign languages, but with a bit of research and the assistance of talented translators, it’s actually quite easy to do. And think of the size of your potential audience if you’re tweeting in 10 languages, instead of just one!
What are your thoughts on the subject?
