Build Communities with Global Social Strategy
Six-thousand tweets are sent every second, 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube daily, and Facebook has become the third most popular website. A social media account has become much more than a landing page for your business. It now acts as an advertising tool, an arm of your company that builds online communities around a product or service, but most importantly, a primary selling tool.
Maintaining successful international social platforms can have positive effects on your search ranking and traffic to your site. Consistently using a brand persona to post helpful articles and tips and develop discussion topics while actively engaging users in real-time can build a following quickly. When your channels grow organically, this is an indicator to search engine algorithms that your site and/or content is relevant and authoritative. The same theory applies when influencing the social sharing of your content.
Maintaining successful international social platforms can have positive effects on your search ranking and traffic to your site. Click to Tweet
Growing a social media following isn’t going to happen overnight, but organic growth is worth it. There are options to buy bulk followers on different social media; this may be tempting but does not bode well with Google’s search engine as it can discern between a quality follower and a bot. Putting together content schedules and delivering on them takes time and revenue, but following through could bring considerable returns.
Operating with a global social media plan while locally optimizing PPC ads, articles, or social media posts can help better understand a segmented audience’s behavior, interests, communication style, etc. An aggregate of information like this helps in making campaign decisions and engaging in discussions locally. After practicing real-time engagement with consumers, it is easier to create content benefiting their experience. Also, locally optimizing content can positively impact your site rankings in that region.
International social media strategy can be much more involved than it seems. Cultural differences and online behavior changes platform by platform. It is essential to know the differences in social platforms before selecting them for your brand. Is YouTube comparable to China’s YY for streaming video content? Is Twitter similar to Sina Weibo, China’s microblogging network? Identifying these upfront saves time and money in making changes to the campaign later.
Maintaining a solid social media platform with a variety of content that is well produced creates an entertainment and education resource that benefits brand perception and drives sales. This is also an aggregate for consumers’ qualitative information: opinions, product reviews, potential service or product opportunities, and other actionable information. Instantaneous feedback, when analyzed, can improve market intelligence and give an edge against competitors.
Maintaining a strong social media platform with a variety of content that is well produced creates an entertainment and education resource that benefits brand perception and drives sales. Click to Tweet
While social media can generate sales at one-third of the cost of traditional methods, international social media has additional charges. One of the more significant investments is in language translation. You have to be cognizant of cultural interpretations or language and incorrect translation. An outside agency or in-house specialist might need to monitor this. You wouldn’t want to spend time and resources to get your message to a specific audience only to get lost in translation.
As you develop your social media marketing strategy, take time to consider if an international social media plan is right for your business; there is no one size fits all program. It is essential to ask questions like, are you getting enough business in other countries to support the investment? If you sell in multiple regions, can you maintain content in two or more languages? If your company has the resources to correctly implement a global social media strategy, it can do wonders for your brand.
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