Every day in my Google Alerts I get dozens of hits for the term ‘social media’. There are news services reporting on over-50s or under-15s ‘flocking to social’ and ‘gurus’ offering advice on ‘monetising your social media strategy’, and then there are ‘experts’ warning against said ‘gurus’.

But the one thing I don’t see a lot of is advice on social media strategies for foreign language markets.


This seems strange to me because the localisation industry is huge – most adventurous businesses now realise that the way forward is to start selling in foreign markets, in order to increase their customer share and spread around the currency risk (especially those companies whose main market was the weakened Sterling).

Yet while many see the benefits in going global by using the internet, with dedicated foreign language websites and marketing and sales strategies (as we’ve done at Lingo24), I’ve not yet seen a concerted move towards localisation for social media marketing.

Why have the great marketing and export trends of the century yet to converge? It’s not as though there’s no viable market. Take China, for instance. Facebook and Twitter may be blocked by the Chinese government, but that doesn’t mean that China doesn’t have its own ecosystem of social networks.

In fact, some studies suggest that social networking is even more popular in China than in the rest of the world – apparently 92% of Chinese web users are into social media, compared with 72% of American web users.

Chinese Facebook clone renren.com now has over a hundred million users – but even that is dwarfed by Qzone.com, which has reported over 200 million registered users, making it the most popular social network in Mainland China and probably the second largest social network in the world (if the figures are true), surpassing Orkut, Habbo, Twitter and Bebo.

Meanwhile, the ‘Chinese Twitter’, micro-blogging site t.sina.com.cn is ranked at 16th place in the world by Alexa (and 4th within China) and t.sina blogger Han Han (a 27 year-old celebrity singer and race car driver) is quite likely the world’s most popular blogger. Despite (or indeed, because of) flirting with censorship by criticising the Chinese government, his blog has garnered over 400 million hits. In fact, Han Han’s reach is such that he was listed on the 2010 Time Magazine ‘World’s Most Influential People List’.

Then you’ve got social networks kaixin001.com, which appeals to the white collar office worker crowd rather than the student crowd, and 51.com, which is popular amongst rural web users. With this amount of demographic segmentation amongst China’s social media users, it’s clear that any foreign company wanting to move into social marketing is going to need to really do their research first, to find out where their customers are networking and how best to reach them.

In this scenario, employing a local ‘social media guru’ could really come in handy, to bring an intimate local knowledge of not only the language, but also online behaviours and taboos (particularly important in an internet ecosystem where a wide range of keywords, from ‘Tiananmen’ to ‘democracy’, will see your posts banned).

But making the investment in understanding language-specific social media is undeniably worth the investment. If you look at China alone – and don’t even take into account other countries with popular social networking alternatives to Facebook, such as Brazil, the Czech Republic, South Korea and Japan – by 2015 it’s estimated that there will be more native Chinese speakers online than English speakers. That’s a market to ignore at your own peril!