A Guide to Multilingual Social Media Management

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The social media world is truly global, and many people and companies who are utilizing social media most likely have followers in different countries who are speaking different languages. This means that you are probably creating content in a variety of languages so that your brand’s voice is heard clearly. For this reason, various businesses and brands, media companies, NGOs, perhaps even influencers, are currently operating multilingual social media accounts to address their diverse audiences, which inevitably requires a comprehensive multilingual social media strategy.

As many who work in an international social media context will tell you, there are several challenges that come with multilingual social network management (SMM) not only due to the sheer number of social media profiles that need to be manage, but also because it generally requires entire teams to effectively undertake. This means that successful multilingual social media management revolves around organizing many different tasks for a team response for a company’s social media accounts.

In this article, we will talk about the challenges that accompany any multilingual social media operation and how you can create an effective multilingual social media strategy to make your profiles be successful. In doing so, we will discuss the various parts of multilingual social media management as they relate to the analytics, content, monitoring, and community management tasks. Throughout this discussion, we will provide helpful tips and best practices that will assist you in navigating your multilingual social media activities.

Creating a Multilingual Social Media Strategy

There are a number of tasks for social media managers to undertake when it comes to overall social media management for profiles posting in different languages. Rather than simply hoping that your social media team effectively and efficiently manages these various accounts, it is recommended to create a comprehensive multilingual social media strategy that addresses all the various aspects of social media management. The primary aspects of a comprehensive multilingual social media strategy you should focus on revolve around the analytics, content, monitoring, and community management activities.

Multilingual social network management can be difficult, especially since various team members may not only be assigned specific tasks such as publishing content, gaining analytic insights, or managing your communities. These tasks generally need to be done individually for different language groups. Therefore, a good multilingual social network management strategy relies first and foremost on organization and communication between team members. For this reason, a social media tool with effective project and task management features is a must.

In the rest of the article, we will go through the different aspects of multilingual social media management and highlight some best practices to take in order to effectively manage them. Keep in mind that companies and brands working in international settings may face different challenges depending on what they are trying to accomplish. However, we believe that the following tips and best practices will be relevant for almost all companies operating in several national and regional markets simultaneously.

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Multilingual Social Media Analytics

Social media managers know discovering ways to optimize your content and set realistic goals through benchmarking analyses are important parts of an overall social marketing strategy. That is why so many working in social media use tools to help them undertake analyses that you simply cannot do by yourself. These social media tools can help you find the best times to post, top-performing hashtags, trending topics in your industry, and what types of content are most successful.

However, multilingual social media analytics adds complexity to many of these analyses, since local markets and target audiences may have different interests or preferences when it comes to looking at specific trends or comparing your local accounts to others in a particular country or region. Moreover, you may have a number of local competitors with accounts or other similar profiles you want to better understand and benchmark your performance against.

For most businesses who are operating in an international environment with different social media profiles posting for national or regional markets, there are special needs for a social media analytics tool. Therefore, when shopping for the right social media analysis and benchmarking tool for these situations, you should look for a tool that has two certain capabilities.

The first is that the social media tool allows you to split up your analysis and look at local markets in the language of your course individually. This means that the tool should give you the option to create multiple dashboards, as well as the ability to customize your reports according to your needs. Different markets generally require close examination with regard to the performance of social media profiles operating within those markets. While it can make sense to do cross market comparisons to find trends and areas of potential, you generally want to know how successful your content is for specific target audience segments based on a country or region level.

Second, and perhaps most important, is the ability to track an unlimited number of profiles so you can actually conduct these analyses in multiple markets. For instance, let’s say that you are responsible for various multilingual social media marketing campaigns for Asia and oversee the analytics for regional-based social media profiles that are active in the Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Just in this case alone, you most likely not only want to analyze your own profiles across social media networks that are operating in each one of these countries, but also potentially dozens of other profiles across social media networks.

If you are managing profiles in multiple countries and what to conduct competitor benchmarking and analysis, you probably need to track and analyze well over 100 profiles. If you have been working with social media tools, you might have realized that almost all of them limit the number of profiles you can track and manage. Luckily, there are tools that allow you to track an unlimited number of profiles. In addition to allowing you to analyze all your accounts as well as those of your competitors, this can also greatly enhance the accuracy of analyses such as finding the best times to post on your local profiles for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and Twitter.

Multilingual Social Media Content Creation

Multilingual social media management almost always requires the planning and creation of a comprehensive content and posting plan that allows you to post similar content on all your social media channels in various countries while localize them to their target markets. The task of posting on multiple channels and creating translations for the same content into different languages is clearly a team effort. Moreover, the creation of engaging multilingual social media content and successful campaigns often requires you to effectively brainstorm and work together as an entire team on content creation.

The first thing you need related to multilingual content creation for social media is the ability to manage your tasks and schedule your content so that your plans are transparent and no step is missed. Specialized organizational and project management features as part of a social media tool for multilingual social media content can be helpful to keep track of everything you need to do, as well as who is responsible for what tasks. Moreover, AI integration for content creation in multiple languages is also a useful feature to have as part of your social media publishing tool. AI is becoming increasing important for helping inspire content ideas, formulating exciting captions, and translating texts, not to mention the flexibility it gives you with image creation. Having multilingual capabilities with AI integration can be helpful for you to create engaging content in multiple languages or translating your captions.

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Another important feature when it comes to multilingual social media content management is having unlimited multi-posting capabilities that allow you to schedule and automatically publish similar content on all your profiles. After all, you may have several profiles that you are publishing on in various markets and want to be able to efficiently publish similar content without having to start each time from scratch. For this reason, you most likely want multi-posting features that allow you to post similar content on various profiles. Moreover, as we already mentioned, many social media publishing tools limit the amount of profiles you can manage with your tool. This means that, for many businesses that have multilingual social media operations, it makes sense to look for tools that excel in multi-posting and do not limit you with the number of profiles you can manage with the tool.

Multilingual Social Media Community Management

As we have already shown, having effective social media analytics and publishing capabilities is essential for multilingual social media management. However, one of the most time-consuming is community management. For many companies that operate social media profiles focused on different countries, there are many channels to attend to by managing and responding to commenting, mentioning, and posting in various languages. This means that you normally require an entire team that needs to effective and efficiently organize and respond to everything.

Those who are growing a social media following know the importance of building a strong community. This generally means that not only to invest time in encouraging interaction, answering questions, and making your those in your community feel like they matter, but you also need to invest in the right tools that help you do it right. In a multilingual social media setting, your community management tool should come with organizational features that give you the option to tag and assign conversations, as well as providing you with an overview of who is responsible for what conversations. Moreover, the right social media tool should help you save time, whether it is through AI to help you create responses to messages, the creation of templates, or for the automation of tasks.

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Multilingual Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring is a growing need, especially for brands and companies operating in different countries and regions. Monitoring mentions of your brand on the internet can help you better manage your company’s reputation, as well as get a better idea of what people think and are saying about your company and/or products. However, needing to monitor the mentions of your brand in various markets generally requires a specialized tool that monitors the web, especially if you are posting in multiple languages and in multiple countries. This can all be a lot to monitor and analyze.

Multilingual social media monitoring tools can help you effectively see what people are saying about your company online in different countries. These advanced tools for social media monitoring just don’t help you monitor what is being said but also let you where comments are coming from as well as metrics associated with those comments and mentions such as reach. Additionally, a sentiment analysis function as part of a social media monitoring tool can be a great way to understand the opinions of your brand in various locations and in different languages. This is an especially effective approach is you are dealing with hundreds, thousands, or even millions of comments about your company or brand across the internet.

How to Excel at Multilingual Social Media Management

Multilingual social media management is not easy, but it is important to look for tools that can help you effectively manage it. First and foremost, it is important to focus on your internal processes and strategy while making sure there is good team organization and community. While a social media tool designed for multilingual management will not, by itself, make your multilingual social media activities a success, it can dramatically help you gain new analytic insights, better organize and manage your responses your community and publishing tasks, and also monitor mentions of your brand on the internet.

If you are looking for a tool that can assist you with multilingual social media management, you can try Fanpage Karma’s free 14-day trial to see for yourself how it can improve your overall performance. Fanpage Karma offers unparalleled analytical insights and benchmarking features for your profiles, since it offers unlimited profile tracking and management. Moreover, our publishing tool allows you to publish your content on all your profiles simultaneously, even if you have multiple profiles on one social media network. It also comes with project management features to help your team better coordinate content tasks, as well as integrated AI image and content generators. Community management is made easier with the engage tool, allowing you to organization conversations in different languages, create templates and automated workflows, and utilize AI for response creation. Lastly, the social media monitoring tool allows you to keep up-to-date on what is being said about your company online, helping you with brand reputation management.

You can also participate in our free weekly webinar that shows you how you can use Fanpage Karma to better manage all the aspects of your social media presence.