Translate Facebook to target an international audience

WeChat Pay a promising model for Facebook

Facebook is a common denominator in almost all Social Media Marketing strategies. To redirect the target to the website, you must generate content of value adapted to each user. We explain how to translate Facebook and how to make your business profile multilingual.

Change the profile language:

To set the language into which you wish to translate your profile, go to your Facebook timeline at the top right and click on the "Settings" icon.  Then click on the "Language" section and select the language of your choice.

As a general rule, your Facebook profile will only appear in one language. If the aim is to have a multilingual presence, we will need to create a profile for each language, however, if we are looking to have a single multilingual profile, these profiles can be merged into one.

  • The advantage of having a single page is that we can target different audiences (segmentation).
  • The disadvantage is that the translations offered by Facebook are not very reliable.

Posting content:

Facebook offers you two options to adapt your posts to each user, depending on your priorities: the first, and most recommended, segment your content so that it appears to the users of your choice. The second is the easiest and fastest, since you post your content in the language of your choice and it's the users who translate your post using Facebook's machine translation tool.

When posting content, it can be targeted to the audience segments we wish to reach. By clicking on the icon below the post text box, we will find the option to select the target audience for this specific post.

When you click on the icon, you will be able to target by age, location, gender, languages, etc.

Facebook has a computer-assisted translation function for the content posted by each user. Users can translate posts by clicking on the "Translate" button on the top left of the post.

The user is immediately displayed a computer-assisted translation done by Facebook. The downside of this is that the post will not be targeted and, therefore, it will appear to all users, thereby reducing the post's engagement.

What is the volume of Facebook users worldwide?

Below are some figures that confirm the growth of this social media in recent years and should be of consideration to businesses when deciding on their presence and social media strategy.

In June 2017, Facebook had 2 billion active users every month. Overall, Facebook is the social media network with the most users (85%) worldwide. South America and Australia is where they are best known and Asia is trailing behind with the lowest rate because they use their own social media there, such as Qzone in China. 

If we're talking about developing an international social media strategy, knowing which social media are used in each country is basic for carrying out our actions. This is what the world social media ranking looks like, according to statistics gathered by We Are Social and Hootsuite:

Social media use by businesses is very significant. There are already many brands, 50 million of them, using Facebook in their marketing strategy. Let's see how the existence of brands on social media affects users:

According to the annual study on social media by IAB Spain, 83% of users (8 out of 10) follow brands on social media. A large part of these users feel influenced by the posts made by brands on social media.

In conclusion, it is important to study and value the presence of a brand on each social network and reflect on how we want to carry out our digital strategy, locally or broadening the communication to other markets. In this case, the translation and adaptation of the published content play a significant role.

And what about your business? Do you have a Facebook presence yet?

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ATLS

Written by ATLS

Translation and digital marketing agency
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