The world is full of rich, diverse cultures and beautiful languages. That is to our benefit. But as a business, what happens when you are fortunate enough to have an audience so diverse that they speak multiple primary languages?
This is becoming increasingly common, especially since the internet has made it possible for our businesses to reach further than ever before. Even if your business has a small, local audience, however, your audience may consist of different languages. In Florida, for example, Spanish is the first language for a large number of people.
You can’t risk excluding potential customers just because your social media doesn’t translate well, and you don’t want to.
So what’s the solution? In this post, we’re going to take a look at what you can do if your social audience speaks multiple languages, and how to decide which strategy is the best option for you.
What Are My Translation Options?
There are a several different ways you can go about interacting with a diverse audience that contains multiple first languages. This includes:
- Creating a Page for each language. I’ve seen a few brands do this, especially large brands. BuzzFeed is notably good at this, with pages for the French-speaking and Japanese-speaking markets, among other language regions. While the majority of the content on the Pages stay the same, each will be translated completely. Unless you want to hire a social media manager for each language, I typically recommend against this for small businesses with limited time. We already know how exhausting it is to keep up with one set of social profiles; imagine trying to do that for two or three.
- You can rely on the Translate Facebook tool. Several years ago, Facebook released an on-site app that lets users translate the content on the site into their chosen language. I can visit even the profile pages of a business whose primary language is Portuguese and at least be able to get the gist of what they’re saying.
- You can use Facebook’s “post in multiple languages” feature. This is a relatively new feature that allows businesses to post a message in multiple languages. Instead of Facebook’s translation feature (which we may have all noticed can be a little inaccurate), this lets you type in the exact phrases you want. If your social media manager speaks both English and Spanish, for example, she’ll do a much better job offering messages in both languages than Facebook’s translation tool. This feature also solves the problem a lot of businesses were having of trying to write the same message different languages in the same post, creating huge blocks of text.
How to Enable the Post in Multiple Languages Feature on Facebook
This feature is currently only for Facebook. In order to use it, go into your settings, and then scroll down in the “General” section until you see “Post in multiple languages.” Click on “edit”
