By using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, and other social media, organizations can engage prospects, promote deals, encourage brand loyalty, and feed traffic to their websites—increasing the likelihood of gaining conversions and boosting profits. Marketing professionals might therefore be hard-pressed to find the downside of social media interaction.
However, a marketer's social media play gets significantly more complicated when she engages on such platforms in multiple countries and in scores of languages.
That's not to say that internationally focused companies should neglect social media. Tweets, Facebook status updates, blogs, and YouTube videos can be valuable elements of strategic, integrated marketing campaigns.
Follow these six best-practices to ensure the greatest return on investment in localized social media.
1. Start with international search engine marketing (ISEM)
Keywords are everything. That is true domestically, and it is true internationally.
Before you build a blog for China, or produce YouTube videos in French, or start tweeting in Spanish, do your keyword homework. Assign adequate resources to researching target markets and building keyword lists that will resonate with customers and search engines in those regions.
That work requires an awareness not only of regional dialects and colloquial speech but also of the algorithms of locally preferred search engines.
2. Social media cannot save a poor marketing campaign
For all the hype surrounding social media marketing, it can't carry an otherwise-lackluster marketing effort.
International outreach should be a multipronged effort, including ISEM practices, targeted pay-per-click ads, relevant landing pages, multilingual rich media, adapted banner ads, out-of-home advertising, experiential marketing with people on the ground, philanthropic community involvement, and events, such as launch parties and networking functions.
To avoid disappointment in your social media effort, view it as one piece of many that comprise a whole campaign.
3. Social media requires local hires