Those readers involved in marketing will know the concept of targeting the right people, at the right time, in the right place. If you decide that social media is the right place, you may be wasting your time if all your posts are in English when 50% of your customers are Spanish. Likewise, if you try to address the large Arabic-speaking world with a website that offers little content in Arabic, well, let's say there is a small handicap in your strategy. This is a relatively easy and cost effective way to run a global marketing campaign, which traditionally would have demanded huge budgets, making it inaccessible to many smaller businesses. All you need for a successful social media campaign is a good translator and some local knowledge to ensure your campaigns aren’t inadvertently offensive to some cultures. I’d highly recommend reading this very entertaining article from Business insider, which highlights some marketing campaigns which were definitely lost in translation. One of the most famous examples of this was a Pepsi campaign which had the slogan "Come alive with Pepsi". Unfortunately, when it was translated in China it became "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead". However, do not let this put you off. As long as you use a good translator you can avoid these pitfalls. Our one word of advice would be to avoid free programs like Google Translate as these usually offer very poor quality translations and may leave your potential customers very confused. If you get it right, then taking this simple step could transform your business. As noted by James Brockbank on the SearchEngineJournal.com in September 2015, 75% of internet users will make important purchase decisions when products are in a language they speak and over 70% of global users don’t cite English as their mother tongue. By producing English-only social media marketing, you could be excluding over 70% of Internet users.
Another pitfall to avoid is assuming the social media channels which work in your home market will work in other countries. The obvious example of this is Facebook, which might be one of the world’s most popular networks but is banned in China. Do your research and find out the most popular networks in your target country, then find out what type of people use them and pick the site most relevant to your business. It’s absolutely no different to planning a marketing campaign in your own country, it just happens to be in a different language and targeted at a different culture. Here are our top 5 tips for launching a multilingual social media campaign.