Succeeding In The Foreign Language Internet Through Social Media and SEO

Check out this very interesting guest post from Christian Arno of Lingo24 discussing some very important parts of optimizing your website for other languages through the use of social media and SEO.  A topic I personally am not well versed on but this is very useful info!

Succeeding In The Foreign Language Internet Through Social Media and SEO

Social media is more than just a platform for personal interactions – after just a few years in the mainstream, networks such as Facebook and Twitter have gone from being solely social tools to becoming indispensable tools in every online marketer’s arsenal. If you’re looking to break into foreign markets online, then having a grasp of social media is essential.

With more than 750 million active Facebook users worldwide and 175 million tweeters, not to mention the masses on overseas giants like Orkut and QZone, there’s a huge audience worldwide that you can reach for minimal cost.

But while social media may be the most cost effective form of online advertising, the trick when reaching out internationally is to tailor your approach and content to the language and culture of your target audience.

Intensive localization is also essential when it comes to the search engine optimization of your website. In order for your website to appear in foreign search engines, the content needs to be optimized with the top performing keywords in the target language – and direct translations from English are rarely correct (but more on that later).

So how can you benefit from Social Media?

Social media marketing cannot be measured in the same way as traditional marketing, by looking at the cost/benefit ratio and return on investment – you can’t declare, ‘if I invest 40 hours a month on Twitter and send 80 tweets I will get 10 new conversions each month’, as the benefits are not as direct as pay-per-click (PPC) or other marketing forms.

The benefits of social media marketing are more ancillary, including: helping you reach a broader audience, opening up the opportunity for direct sales, increasing brand awareness, generating new leads, managing customer service and monitoring feedback online regarding your business.

In the modern ecommerce environment, though, social media marketing (SMM) is as essential to your marketing arsenal as search engine optimization and PPC, especially when establishing your brand in foreign language markets. The trick is to pick the right social network to target!

Which sites should you focus on?

While Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are dominant across much of North and South America, Western and Northern Europe, North Africa and Australasia, many significant international markets use different social networks, as this map demonstrates.

In China, the world’s fastest growing ecommerce market, Qzone and Renren claim 380 and 120 million users respectively. Of the other growing BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China), Brazilians vastly prefer to use Google’s Orkut network, which is also the second most popular network in India (edged out of the top spot by Facebook), and in Russia LinkedIn-style business network VKontakte rules the roost. There are also many social networking sites focused on specialist sectors or communities, so it’s worthwhile looking into any niche networks in your target markets that are relevant to you.

How can you communicate across cultures (and languages)?

It may seem an obvious point, but it’s worth emphasizing that if you’re looking to get fans and followers on social media networks in foreign countries, then your customers won’t be native English speakers – if indeed they speak English at all – and studies by the Common Sense Advisory as well as the European Commission show that more than 85% of all consumers require information in their native language when considering a purchase online.

This means you’ll need to have your tweets, posts, videos, comments and other social media content translated into the target language; and not only translated, but also localized, which means taking into account local cultural factors including tone, currency, measurements, etc.

Machine translation programs like Google Translate may appear to offer the fastest and cheapest translation option, but they are prone to contextual and grammatical errors, and are dangerous to trust with something as important as your marketing content. Your best option is to engage a local linguist and social media specialist to translate and localize your English social media content, and to also manage interaction on your foreign language profiles.

SEO: how can you optimize your site for foreign languages?

SMM is only part of the battle, though. You may have a highly successful international social media strategy in place that’s driving customers towards your translated local websites, but if your sites aren’t properly optimized for their target language and search engine, then you won’t appear in the search rankings and will miss out on all that organic search traffic.

The first question you’ll face when looking at establishing foreign language websites is whether to target your sites by language or country. Obviously it will be far less time and resource consuming to create websites that are targeted by language rather than country – you can have one Spanish site for the whole Spanish-speaking world, one English site for the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, etc, one French site for the Francophone world, and so forth.

Unfortunately this short-cut approach throws up a few issues. Firstly, languages can differ greatly in usage between different countries. The Spanish spoken in Spain is very different to that spoken in Mexico, which is different again to the Latin American Spanish spoken in Argentina. Similarly, Quebecois and the French spoken in France are vastly different, and there are even small but significant differences in vocabulary and spelling between the USA and the UK.

Secondly, different countries use different payment systems and currencies, which is a crucial element to get right for any ecommerce site. Also, search engines take local domain names and local hosting into account when ranking websites, so if you invest in having individual country code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) such as www.example.ca for Canada and www.example.es for Spain then your sites will fare much better when consumers search for your service or product in Canada or Spain (for example).

The second part of the battle is to make sure that the keywords you’re targeting are the top performers for the local market. Direct translations from English are rarely correct, as the most popular terms, or those with the best competition-to-search-volume ratio, might be colloquialisms, adoptions from English (such as ‘voli low cost’, the top Italian search term for ‘cheap flights’), or any other term. The only way to make sure you have the right keywords is to get in a local translator to research a full list of possible terms and then analyze these using the keyword research tool of your target search engine.

It’s not a small project, reaching out to the non-English speaking audience online, but if you consider that close to 2 billion people are online, and only 34 million (less than 2%!) are native English speakers, then making an effort to reach those consumers becomes a no-brainer!

About the author

Christian Arno is the founder of Lingo24, one of the world’s fastest growing translation agencies. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 150 employees spanning Asia, Europe and the Americas, and clients in over sixty countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated over forty million words for businesses in every industry sector, including the likes of MTV, World Bank and American Express. Follow Lingo24 on Twitter: @Lingo24.