So, you’ve been able to build a huge social media following. You have followers from Kuwait to France, speaking 10 different languages. Congratulations! But wait – you only post in English? Many social media marketers make this mistake. Since English is generally accepted as the official language of media, you might assume that everyone on social prefers, or is able to, communicate in English. However, due to the global reach of brands, many of your followers may recognize your brand but not your language. This means that your content is being wasted on these followers, and they feel that they are not a valuable portion of your audience.
If you regionalize some of your posts – by picking a specific country or region and posting something that is culturally and linguistically relevant to them – you will often see greater engagement than had you posted the same thing in English. See why below:
1. Improve your relevance
Facebook’s algorithm (what used to be called Edgerank) is constantly adjusting and ranking posts based on a number of metrics, one of which is relevance to users. Obviosuly, a post that uses the same language that a user browses Facebook in is going to be more relevant than one in English. This can be a valuable way for brands to break through the clutter on Facebook: in a sense you’re using Facebook itself to break through the clutter. As more users engage with the post, the algorithm recognizes the post as more relevant, leading to a compound effect similar to virality.
2. Engage Different Segments
Just because your post has a strong engagement rate doesn’t mean that it is engaging every segment of your followers. Without posting in other languages or making culturally specific posts, you may never be engaging segments outside of North America. Bring them in, and make them feel valued.
3. Show your globalization
Especially for a smaller brand, engaging different segments by creating posts specifically for them can be a powerful signaling tool. It shows that your brand is large enough to be recognized in other regions, and that you have a large enough fan base in those regions to merit creating content specifically for them. This can attract more global fans, because they will see that your brand is welcoming to fans like them.
4. Better Understand Your Regions
Without an analytics tool like Crowdbabble, it can be difficult to understand where exactly your fans are from. When you post in different languages, you can judge the engagement on each post and understand how much of your fan base is made up of individuals that speak that language. For example, if twice as many people like your Spanish posts as your French posts, it is reasonable to confirm that your Spanish fan base is twice the size of your French fan base. You can then adjust your strategy accordingly. Alternatively, you could use Crowdbabble’s demographics tab, pictured in this article.
5. Better Targeting = Better ROI
We learned this first hand recently when we launched ads in Spanish and Portugese. The Spanish ad garnered 70+ likes, 15 shares and a high number of conversions. The Portugese ad had a relevance score of 7 (out of 10, twice that of our other ads), and generated a similar number of likes. We sent these ads only to people in Spanish/Portuguese speaking countries, and clearly they showed that they much preferred to see an ad in their language. This seems pretty obvious, however these ads performed better than our broadly targeted English ads. We have since directed more energy to regionally defined Facebook advertising.
How to create the actual posts or advertisements is very dependent on the type of product that you are selling and your user-base. What has worked for us in the past has been to focus on features that would be relevant to people in other countries: for example the ability to change the time-zone used in the app, or the language. Generally changing the language is the best place to start, and then you can drill-down to deeper levels of relevance.