Management of a global brand does not have to be difficult. You can plan ahead, create the necessary documentation, and align your team to ensure that you have a global reach while still keeping your strategy local.
Social media makes it possible to communicate with people on a global level. Are you making the most of social media’s full potential? Is your company a global social media influencer?
There are many factors to consider when designing a global social marketing strategy. This article you will learn about how to grow your social media internationally.
Table of Contents
How to grow your social media internationally?
Start producing great content
It won’t help much to update a status or tweet a link to your website by simply updating it. To engage users, post great content to your website and share it on social media. Great content ideas include images, videos, infographics and blog posts. It doesn’t matter if it’s about a new product or a video explaining how it works, it’s great content that can drive people to your website and keep them there longer.
Some brands have found that offering exclusive deals to Facebook and Twitter fans, or content that can only be viewed by them, works well no matter what time of the year. Consider what kind of content you could offer your followers or fans that they would be interested in. Are they looking for a coupon or an infographic?
Relevant and valuable content can turn strangers into fans, and customers into fans. You must share and give to make an impact on your target audience. Your content should be focused on the most important social media outlets for your brand.
Social content is different from traditional content. You must produce content that educates. When you are dealing with international audiences, your content must be adaptable to their culture and translated.
Staying on top of the latest trends in global business, culture, and technology
You must keep up-to-date with global trends in technology, culture, and business to build a global social media presence. Social media is the best way to stay on top of all developments.
Follow relevant social media accounts to keep up with the latest developments.
How to Build a Multilingual Social Media Presence?
A staff of native speakers is only the beginning. How can you build your international social media presence. These are the steps you should follow.
- Know your target audience
- Don’t rely on translation tools alone
- Do not just translate, but localize too
- Visualize Your Content
- Make use of the available tools in the platforms
Share easily
You can make it easy for people to share your content and give up some control. There are many benefits to allowing others to share your content. You can gain links and drive traffic to your website by making it easy for people to share your content.
You run the risk that your content is shared by another company, platform or site.
Create a global team for social media marketing
There are many elements that you need to take into consideration when building a social media team, particularly a global one. What will they do? Which cultures are they most skilled in? Do they have a good understanding of the region they are posting from? These are all important questions to ask.
If your strategy is dependent on reaching your audience, it’s a good idea to rely on local experts and native speakers when expanding your team. If you have experts and markets that can comment on your posts, let your team members see your work. This process can be simplified by using a tool. Sprout Social Groups can be used to group different markets or stakeholders together in order to improve content visibility and approvals.
Create distinct social media accounts for each market
Your account will feel more personal if you create separate accounts and take the time to manage them locally. Twitter is now the most popular platform for businesses to communicate their messages. One caveat is that even though it might seem tempting to create a single account and tweet in different languages from it, your Italia followers will not be able to understand your German tweets. A unique approach can make a difference!
Be omnipresent
Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube are all good options for building a strong social media presence. You should not forget that social media channels in English-speaking countries may not be the only way to communicate. If you want to make an impact in these countries, Renren, Sina Weibo, Yandex, VKontakt, or Orkut are all options.
Optimize all digital assets and integrate them
Make sure to create a transcript for any video you create. Also ensure that the translation is appropriate for your target market. It should be easy to share and contain some content so that users and search engines can find the relevant digital assets. This applies to any photos, audio clips, or infographics.
Keywords, descriptions, tags and links are all important in optimizing digital assets. So plan ahead for all content, not just written.
Integrating across different platforms, whether it’s social media, SEO or offline, is as important as creating content for a specific marketing medium.
You can fine tune your social media strategy to a country-level
It is important to ask the following questions: To whom am I talking? What are they looking for from me online? What social media tools do they use in the market that we are targeting? What will be the future of this strategy? This strategy is not about tools and tactics, or the exact definition of each. These are the basic ideas that will help you tie social media to your business needs. What’s my goal in social media marketing? What are my real goals with social media marketing? What activities and behaviors can I use on social media to help me get there? What can I do to encourage this behavior?
