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How does your company manage social media across countries?

4596 Views 3 Replies Latest reply: Sep 10, 2010 2:16 PM by folk trash
Nate Elliott Active 14 posts since
Jul 15, 2009
Currently Being Moderated

Sep 1, 2010 4:43 AM

How does your company manage social media across countries?

Working in Europe, I'm constantly hearing about social media programs designed for one country accidentally reaching users in other countries -- especially when they're done in English. Toyota's excellent social media-focused iQ car launch in the UK attracted attention from the US, where the car isn't available. Yesterday a client told me that their Australian marketing team launched a Facebook page that they thought was just for their market -- but when they looked at the analytics, they found only about 5% of the page's fans were Australian, with the rest coming from other big English-speaking markets.

 

As I see it, there are two big challenges when global companies use social media:

  1. How do you best leverage social media resources from one country (be they staff, technologies, partnerships, or content) across other countries to improve your efficiency and effectiveness?
  2. How do you keep social media messages that are appropriate for just one market (because product availability, or specifications, or pricing, or marketing message can vary from place to place) from 'bleeding out' to reach users in other markets?

 

I'm planning to write some research on this topic in the near future, and would love to hear your thoughts!

  • All digital content, especially on the web, is best considered Global until proven otherwise... especially when the content is in a widely spoken laguage like English. Below is a simple example of a hub and spokes strategy that may be helpful both to keep people in your company sane, to improve the experience of your users, and to improve things like SEO.

     

    Depending on the medium (your corporate www site, facebook, twitter, etc.) and your company's size, you can set up some simple governance (standard naming protocol for local versus Global site, common URLs, templates, etc.) to drive productivity and also help capture local audiences with relevant local content but linking those sites to the Global site is usually key.

     

    If your company or brand is big enough, consider a hub and spokes strategy for each of your key brands and each of your key mediums. For example:

    • Create a Global Hub presense on Facebook "My Brand On Facebook"
    • Create Local pages that hang off of the main Facebook site "My Brand On Facebook - Australia"
    • Make sure your Local pages point heavily to your Global Hub for that medium (i.e. Facebook)
    • Your Global Hub can then also promote the best content from around the world pulling from any of the Local sites and representing your Brand in a holistic, worldly and positive way.
  • folk trash Member 1 posts since
    Sep 10, 2010
    1. You don't. There are no countries on the web.
    2. See #1.

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