If your business goals for this year include reaching out to new clients or converting your leads into customers, there’s one good marketing strategy worth looking into: social media localisation.

What is social media localisation?

Simply put, it’s an adaptation of content published on social media platforms for your target audience. It usually requires creating new profiles in the language of your customers, but it goes beyond the mere translation of your original status updates.

To engage with your fans and followers you’ll need to share posts that resonate with their culture and buying habits. Promotions for local holidays, references to local events or traditions, or visuals presenting your product in the country of your target users are good examples of the localised social media content.

Why is it a good strategy for 2018?

1. Content marketing is still gaining momentum

As content marketing will have a huge impact on companies in 2018, you’ll need to make sure your texts and visuals are relevant for each and every market where you sell your products and services.

Social media is one of the content marketing channels, so you can refine your social media marketing strategy to make sure you interact with the right audience.

Once you localise your Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn page, it will be easier to build meaningful relations with your followers and potential customers. Your users will be able to read and understand the content in their local language. This in turn means that they will be more likely to act on it: share your posts, hit the like button, check out your website and finally buy your products.

2. Ephemeral content is the new hot trend

Instagram Stories are one of the top social media trends this year. In a very short time this function reached over 250 million daily users and suppressed a similar feature offered by Snapchat.

For many brands these fleeting photos and videos are great tools to show their personality and fully engage with their users.

With localisation you can exploit these feature even further and create posts that better fit the needs, culture and language of your target users across the world.

Not everyone understands English, so publishing photos or videos with texts in the language of your users will help to catch their attention and make them keep an eye on your business.

3. Local and personal experiences will increase in popularity

Social media experts forecast yet another shift in social media. This year the focus will be on local and personal experiences, especially that Google puts now a higher focus on searches for local information and local companies.

Adding a personal touch to your social content or inviting users to share content generated by them on your pages will definitely increase your brand exposure.

For example, you can ask your followers to share funny pictures with your products or videos shot in your retail location.

You can take this strategy one step further and make your social media stories more local and more personal by using localised content.

If you want your users to share their content on your profile, make sure they can post photos, memes or videos in their language. And that’s another good reason to have a separate Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat account for each and every market to make your brand story more relevant, engaging and effective.

To prepare your marketing strategy for 2018 consider adapting your social media profiles to your target market. With social media localisation your business will be more likely to build better relation with consumers across the world, increase online presence and convert fans and followers into your loyal customers.

Does your marketing strategy for 2018 include social media localisation?

Dorota Pawlak

Dorota helps digital brands infuse their content with a local touch. She is a localization consultant, translator specialized in IT, prompt engineer, and a book author. Dorota teaches online courses on localization, writes for her blog and a Medium publication. She also runs a Small Biz AI, a Substack newsletter for freelancers and small business owners ready to discover handy AI tools.