Social Media Marketing: 4 Tips to Manage Your Social Media Across Cultures

For most businesses, social media is a trustworthy, cost-effective marketing method to reach potential audiences in a professional (albeit casual!) way. According to the marketers of these companies, social media sites are providing them with a golden opportunity to increase brand awareness, generate leads, manage online corporate image ─ and, last but not least ─ boost ROI!

This is about good businesses, but what about globally-minded successful companies? What, in other words, about the companies that are currently leveraging social media platforms to reach out to multiethnic, multicultural prospective clients across the globe?

Part of the answer is that they are businesses that recognize the large size of multiethnic, multicultural groups across the six continents of the globe – or, to put it differently, companies that are fully aware that, to take just one example, those multilingual groups constitute more than 30% of the population of the United States of America! Is it now worth mentioning that the spending power of this group in the USA falls in the area of USD 2 trillion, more or less?!

Since no good business can ignore the clout of non-English, multicultural potential clients all over the world, we can tweak the answer to point out that successful businesses are, at the end of the day, the companies that are increasingly using social media networks to reach out to new audiences in new markets around the world. 

Social Media Strategy-the Key to Global Success

Given that marketing your company’s products and services on a global scale requires that your company should have local social media accounts that target multiple overseas markets, so managing these accounts across various languages, countries and cultures means that your company must create a solid social media strategy for global markets. 

Following are a few tips that help successful businesses go in this direction to benefit from the endless opportunities that these social platforms offer:

Deep Research

Take it for granted: there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to social media that will achieve success across all markets. Therefore, you need to conduct in-depth research if you wish to understand your prospective customers and learn about their cultures, their preferences, what pleases them, what’s offensive to them, and what they expect from you, etc. 

Moreover, you need to know  where they spend their time, i.e. which social media platforms they usually use, what type of content appeals to them, what images they love and which one they shouldn’t see, how long they spend in this or that social media platforms, and many other aspects of their social behavior.  

Global Brand Consistency

When it comes to social media marketing, you may change anything, except for one thing: your brand voice. It should remain consistent whatever the social media platform you’re using or the country you are targeting. Every and each item of content ─ post, image, video ─ should be reflecting the same identity, tonality and values of your brand with regard to local culture nuances, of course.

The Asset of Monitoring Tools

They are essential to getting the social media marketing job done in a satisfactory way. Whether it is Keyhole, Hootsuite, Twitter Counter, Digimind, TweetReach, Sprout Social, Klout, or Buzzlogix, social media monitoring tools will provide you, down the road, with a lot of insightful ideas about how your prospects and clients see you brand, what they like and what they don’t, and, most importantly, what attracts them the most. 

These insights are important for your business to tweak its social media presence, for example, your content timing and type, so that it fits well with your audiences’ preferences as well as help you to consistently follow and monitor your company’s reputation and online image.

Human Translation is The Key

Machine translation should be avoided when it comes to translating the contents of your posts to multiple audiences. Social media posts mainly rely on local culture and trends in your target market, and even human translators might find some words that hardly be localized in their local language, so it’s a challenging task for humans and not to even consider machines!

If you are not convinced, let me remind you of the good old days when the most famous social media network of the world translated “good morning” into “attack them” and a man was arrested. It doesn’t happen at the best of families. Does it?! Still not convinced? Okay. Let’s cut it short. Google itself has advised everyone on the internet its machine translation service, the Maverick Google Translate, is not “intended to replace human translators.” So, have we now agreed on not letting a translation errors sabotage your invaluable brand?

Why Torjoman?

The largest translation and localization agency in the Middle East, Torjoman has been since day one helping top-notch clients to break boundaries and expand into new markets on both regional and global levels. 

No coincidence! We are a leading translation agency that employs over 1,000 professional translators, who have a command over 120+ languages, have carried out around 10000 translation projects, comprising 54 million words, meeting the requirements of around 5000 global clients. 

So, whether your business is in the industry of manufacturing, finance, e-commerce, travel & tourism, education, life sciences, etc., and whatever the service you require, translation, localization, copy-writing, copy-editing, we are here to support your business. Contact us now to get a free quote.