by Sarah Santacroce
Even though English is usually the common language for international business people, most non native English speakers still prefer to read their daily information and communication in their mother tongue. The same goes for Facebook. And according to Facebook, 70% of their users are outside the United States. Once a user sets his/her preferred language, he/she will see most of Facebooks site in that language.
Which are the two main reasons to have a multilingual Facebook page ?
- You live in a country where there is a big majority of people who speak an other language (in America 10.7 % speak Spanish, in Switzerland 63.7% speak French, 20.4% speak French and 6.5% speak Italian, in Canada 21.6% speak French etc. )
- You do business internationally and your target audience is multilingual
If either one of those reasons applies to you, you might want to start managing your Facebook page in multiple languages. You will see that you will get much more return (comments, likes, interactions) from people, if they get to read your content in their own native language. You could even go a step further and personalize the content with country specific information. For example: in the USA a majority of people uses Linkedin, in France Viadeo is more popular and in Germany it is Xing. So if you post an update about this Social Media tool, you would post Linkedin for the Americans, Viadeo for the French and Xing for the German speaking members. For more details on localization you might find this post about website localization and multilingual SEO interesting.
So now that I have convinced you that a multilingual Facebook page is the way to go, I’ll show you quickly how easy it really is to do:
1. Go to your Facebook page, write a status update and click on the custom button
2. Define your audience by choosing the location and the languages
3. Share your update and recognize the customized posts by the little “custom” icon
That’s it, that’s all there is to it. Of course you have to be fluent in the other language, since grammatical mistakes are not very sexy :-) If you’re not, hire a bilingual Virtual Assistant to help you !
If you found this post helpful, consider joining a growing international community on my Facebook page (and let me know by posting a message in your mother tongue on my wall) or signing up for more helpful small business tips by subscribing to my RSS Feed. Thanks for reading!
