New marketing strategies to engage with customers have led many companies to be active on social media. In traditional push marketing, the marketeer aims to be in control of all the interaction. Pull marketing seeks to understand what messages and content will meet an audience’s needs. Content is placed where the audience is already engaged and seeking information.
Localizing social media content requires the use of native language speakers with knowledge of the local culture, trends and use of colloquial words and terms. All localized websites should lead to local social media, which emphasizes the importance of cohesion in language.
At Localization World Conference we attended a session with representatives of database software giant SAP. They had a few interesting facts:
- In 2012 among Facebook’s top languages, those that saw the greatest rate of growth were Portuguese, Arabic, Spanish and French.
- Chinese is soon set to overtake English as the Internet’s most widely spoken language.
- In 2011, two-thirds (60%) of new Twitter accounts were registered outside the U.S. More than 50% of all the tweets per day were written in a language other than English.
- Large local social media platforms to keep an eye on: Orkut (Brazil), Nasza-Klaza (Poland), VKontakte and Odnoklassniki (Russia), Naver.com Café (South Korea), Baidu and QQ (China).