The guide to global social mediaThe ins and outs of multilingual social marketing

Social is for everyoneSocial media is one of your most powerful tools for growth. Low-cost and highly targeted, the world’s many social platforms have seen rapid adoption by marketers of the smallest businesses and largest brands alike. It’s one of the most cost-effective ways to reach your audiences, segment by interest and keep them engaged, both in your primary market and overseas.

Of all of the places online where people spend their time, you’ll find that your target audience is likely on social—as of 2015, three billion people worldwide were active internet users, and two billion of them were active on social media. Your job? Make it easy for them to find you. Put content in their language, share relevant information and join the conversation.

A website or app where users communicate by sharing information, comments, images, messages and more. Updates from all users, brands and pages appear in a single feed.

ExamplesFacebook, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn

Brand TipBrands on these networks, like individuals, create dedicated pages where users can go to subscribe to updates, interact with content and share their thoughts. Networks also have increasingly sophisticated post and ad targeting.

Sometimes a component of networks or micro/blogs, these apps are dedicated to 1-to-1 or group chat, often lacking a feed component. They include a mix of text, voice and multimedia messaging features.

Examples WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, WeChat, LINE

Brand Tip Brands can get playful with these ephemeral formats, and best practices are already emerging for advertising on these platforms. Our advice? Have fun with it.

Microblogs function like network-style activity feeds (one update after another in a single stream). Traditional blogs are built for longer-form content, similar to digital newspapers and magazines.

Examples Twitter, Medium, Sina Weibo

Brand Tip A communication form all its own, many microblogs give brands the opportunity to purchase ad space, although usually at a higher premium than networks. Blogs are the perfect way to share thought leadership and grow a larger audience.

SOCIAL IS FOR EVERYONE

NETWORK MICRO/BLOGGING

MESSAGING

Social media is a broad concept, comprising every-thing from networks to micro/blogging platforms and messaging services. Here’s what’s what.

1/3 internet users are on social media

2.8 billion active social network accounts worldwide

SOCIAL MEDIA FACTS

NETWORK SPOTLIGHT

Topping the list alongside worldwide networks are a few lesser-known players worldwide that have significant users in the countries and regions they were created in.

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SOCIAL IS FOR EVERYONE

WHICH NETWORK TOPS THE LIST

Ranked in absolute terms by worldwide user numbers, Facebook and Twitter are the world’s top two networks, followed by Google+, Baidu and Instagram. Of the three kinds of social media, messaging apps comprise a significant chunk of the world’s social media usage. See the top social platforms below, by country.

Microblogging platform, launched in 2009 Sina Weibo is a visual blogging service with features like ecommerce, chat and brand-user conversation capabilities. With a huge user base in China, it’s used regularly by individuals, celebrities, media outlets, businesses and government agencies.

Messaging app, launched in 1999 Ever-evolving, Tencent QQ’s modern chat app is among the most popular personal communications

Social network, launched in 2007 Hot with Russian speakers worldwide, VK is Europe’s largest social network and is the second most visited website in Russia. On VK, users share text updates, video, audio and images and can also play browser-based games

Messaging app, launched in 2011 Japan’s LINE, popular as much for its unique stickers and brand characters as its platform, lets users video chat, text and call one another through a single app. LINE also promotes brand-exclusive news and coupon opportunities.

WEIBO

VKONTAKTE (VK)

LINE

QQ

Graph Top social platforms, by country We Are Social, “Digital, Social and Mobile” Compendium (2015)

COUNTRIES FACEBOOK GOOGLE+TWITTER

Brazil

Russia

Singapore

South Korea

USA

Australia

Argentina

Canada

France

Germany

Hong Kong

India

Indonesia

Italy

Japan

Malaysia

Mexico

Philippines

Poland

Saudi Arabia

South Africa

Spain

Turkey

35% 15% 21%

40% 13%

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47%

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28%

33%

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14%

24%

13%

32%

26%

21%

35%

18%

21%

39%

26%

26%

32%

26%

42%

13%

10%

07%

12%

07%

09%

10%

02%

21%

17%

13%

19%

15%

15%

14%

15%

08%

11%

14%

14%

09%

06%

11%

18%

10%

15%

13%

17%

UK 43% 12%19%

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415%

14%

11%

23%

07%

10%

10%

16%

13%

15%

10%

19%

13%

17%

19%

apps in history, with over one billion users in 80+ countries. QQ now features built-in translation and ties into popular Chinese social platform Qzone.

How to translatesocial media contentSocial is a means, not an end. Fueled by your content marketing, it should drive traffic back to your site, establish a strong community and enhance your company’s visibility. Before diving into social, it’s therefore important to regularly create shareable content in your target language. Here’s how.

THE PRE-SOCIAL TRANSLATION FLOW

When is it time to start looking at social? Your translation flow should backwards from your marketing goals, whether it’s increasing your number of users or having shoppers convert into customers. To get the most out of your inter- national social marketing, your entire user funnel should be localized. Follow our flowchartto see what you need to translate to be successful.

PRODUCT

Your product should be one of the first things that you localize. Product localization includes your primary product interface (a dashboard? an admin console? a feed?), including transactioal elements like email (welcome! sign in, forgot password). For an ecommerce company, for example, this is the shopping cart and checkout experience.

WEBSITE

This is usually intertwined with your product translation, especially for ecommerce companies, but not always. The pages that follow your product localization include things like catalogues, how-to pages, about pages, press pages, career pages and other information that isn’t essential to the core product experience.

OPS

Because many customer inquiries come in through social media, social plays an important role in offering full international customer support. On the ops side, it’s important to lock down processes for handling inquiries about your website, product or service before building out your social media marketing.

PROMOTIONAL MATERIALS

Campaigns, landing pages, email, social media. It’s time. After creating an airtight, multilingual digital foundation for your company, double-check that every stage of your customer’s experience is localized and start exploring ways to get your content out to reach international users, including via social media.

CONTENT-BASED MARKETING

Blogs. Articles. White papers. Now we’re getting closer to social territory. The decision behind if and how you’ll translate this information is a big one, and adds another layer of complexity to your marketing efforts. If this is your first time tackling international marketing, take a minute to define these workflows and choose flexible translation tools that will let you regularly create and promote multilingual content.

HOW TO TRANSLATE SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT

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TOOLS AND TRICKS OF THE TRADE

Social media has a lot of moving parts. When sharing content, you have to optimize images, post times, copy and more, across several networks, while engaging with your followers in a brand-friendly and meaningful manner.

One common fear is that adding a second language will naturally double or triple the amount of time you spend on social, depending on how many languages you offer. In reality, it’s simple to streamline your social marketing with proper plan-ning, keeping Social Media Managers from over-heating and marketing leadership pleased with your progress.

BUILD A COMMAND CENTER WITH LOGINS AND FILES

Put everything in one place. Emerging translation platforms help you fully automate social posting, so that when you publish in one language it triggers translation (and publication, if you want) to all associated feeds, and will manage all of these logins through a single page for you. Research what might be best for your company.

HOW TO TRANSLATE SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT

SCHEDULING

You’ll soon get into a rhythm of publishing your multilingual content. Now it’s time to schedule everything in advance, optimizing post times to match your target audience’s time zones to stock their feed with quality branded content. Congrats! But, the job isn’t quite done...

INTERACT

Social isn’t about shouting into the abyss. Just as you should engage users on your primary networks, listening to feedback and responding to com- ments, you should do the same for your foreign language handles. It’s worth taking the time to reach out to users who interact with your pages, crafting a nice, short response and translating it with a quick, quality method.

How you approach creating accounts will vary by social network. Facebook, for example, allows for you to target users by language and location. Twitter doesn’t, and will require that you set up new language-specific feeds. Guided by how customers

CLEAN UP YOUR HANDLES AND SETUP MULTILINGUAL ACCOUNTS

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CREATE A PLAN, WITH CALENDAR AND ROLES

Who is in charge of social media? Do you have a single Social Media Manager? Or several country-specific managers? If he or she is receiving help from other members of the team, who is responsible for which steps in the promotion pro-cess? Will you create content in one language and translate it, or create and curate content for all of your individual target regions? How will you measure success?

11 experience your social page or feed, take a look at where it makes sense to use targeting and where it’s better to set up a separate account and feed for a new language. If creating language-specific feeds, link to these from your localized home- pages and communications and make it easy for multilingual users to find these pages.

HOW TO TRANSLATE SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT

CHALLENGES

LENGTH RESTRICTIONS

Character counts are a hallmark of networks like Twitter. Relative to a language like English, tweets in Spanish and German, for example, will be dramatically longer due to their grammar and word structure. On the other hand, relative to English, you’d have significant flexibility with character- based languages like Chinese and Japanese.

As with other types of marketing content, when it comes to translation, social media has its quirks. While you’re preparing content for translation, notify your translator of the following so that you can move quickly from writing content to publishing it, in every language.

FOREIGN SOCIAL JARGON

Many social media platforms have their own vocabularies. As an American platform, for example, Twitter has its own specialized American English terms. How do you “tweet” in Hindi? What about “posting to someone’s wall”—how do you say that in Tagalog? Often, translators can refer to how that social network itself translates its lexicon, but you must provide that context to ensure your translation is natural, not literal.

LANGUAGE ALONE ISN’T LOCAL

Make sure your language choice matches your target location. If you’re targeting German speakers, which German do you use? German is spoken in several countries, as are other languages, like Spanish, French, Arabic and Russian. The best localization zeroes in on a specific dialect and region, especially if there are significant variations in vocabulary, and sticks with it. Document your language and dialect preferences, and be consistent.1

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About GengoGengo is a people-powered translation platform with tens of thousands of translators world- wide working across all major languages. Gengo delivers fast, affordable, high-quality translation at scale and is perfect for companies in travel, ecommerce, media and more.

Learn more at gengo.com, or chat with us at gengo.com/contact-us.

About FliplingoFliplingo is an all-in-one social media translation service that manages your multilingual accounts from a single dashboard. Fueled by Gengo, Fliplingo offers popular integrations for major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Sina Weibo and more.

Learn more about using Fliplingo’s social media translation platform on fliplingo.com .