Many businesses benefit from advertising their products using the languages of their target audiences as it ensures customers’ confidence and trust. Even local companies can increase their sales by enhancing online presence and implementing at least English in addition to their local language. Multilingual social media presence is already a must for global businesses that want to grow exponentially as the number of prospective customers that speak languages other than English is just impressive, so this opportunity must be utilized.
What Should Be Taken into Consideration?
People usually tend to buy products that are presented in their own language. The difference that active social media can make is also not a secret given the number of active social media users that reached 4.3 billion at the beginning of 2021. Representing your company using multilingual social media will utilize both these opportunities.
- Realize who is your target audience
Make sure that your customers’ profile reflects intended changes before dedicating resources to developing multilingual social media. Proper market research should be done beforehand so that the strategy of enhancing global online presence will adhere to prospective customers’ preferences.
2. Choose a popular platform
More specifically, it should be popular within your target country as dedicating efforts to developing a multilingual Facebook profile will be a waste of time if it is prohibited to use by your target audience or people simply prefer another social media.
3. Content must be relevant and of the high quality
Paying attention to this aspect will not only help you generate more leads but also contribute to your company’s reputation in the long-term perspective. People do remember awkward mistakes or quality issues and those tend to affect trust and decision to buy the offered product.
4. Localization is the key aspect
Stories about culturally irrelevant or even offensive marketing content that resulted in huge financial losses are not fairytales. Real businesses lost real money and customers while they could have avoided it by hiring professional translation services and making adjustments according to the cultural and historical background of the target audience. Understanding foreign culture is essential.
5. Use visual content
Use it, however, still exercise caution as the inappropriate or taboo image may harm your company’s reputation even more than shallow translation. At the same time, visual content is a powerful option good for multiple audiences and its proper use will contribute to the growth of multilingual social media presence.
6. Use social media tools
Social media have integrated analytics tools specifically designed to help businesses develop an effective marketing campaign for their products. It will be a wise decision to utilize these tools and adjust your strategy according to the data they can provide.
7. Build a connection with customers
The very point of social media is the ability to communicate. Make sure your customers can reach you and receive an adequate reply on time. Effective interaction with people contributes to improving online reputation.
8. Choose between double posting and multiple accounts
Depending on the peculiarities of the target audience, especially in the cases of bilingual ones, your social media account can represent either separate posts in different languages or you should have separate accounts for different languages.
Final Thoughts
Developing a multilingual social media presence is not an easy task as it is much more than just changing the language in profile settings. Effective completion of this task means taking into consideration the entire cultural background of your target audience. This challenge is worth your time and resources as the company’s growth is the reward.
