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The business world is truly a global one and if your company plans on marketing to an international audience using social media, it’s important to have a well-considered plan before jumping in.

Diane Urban at HubSpot has seven tips for things you’ll definitely want to consider to make the best impression possible on a foreign audience and optimize your marketing efforts.

1) Segment Your Audience Smartly 

First, determine how you want to segment your social media audience by deciding which countries and languages you want to target, and set some social media goals for each of these audiences. If you need more instruction here, download our new free ebook, The Complete Guide to Global Social Media Marketing.

Next, decide if you can use the localization features of the most popular social networks to segment your audience rather than creating a brand new page or profile for each one. Facebook and LinkedIn have the most comprehensive localization features, so you can limit specific status updates to only appear in the news feeds of specific segments of your audience. Specifically for global marketing, you can choose to segment by geography, language, or a combination of each…

2) Provide Native Translations

Don’t simply take a blog post from your English blog and copy/paste it into Google Translate for your Spanish blog, or vice-versa. Same goes for tweets and Facebook status updates.

Your content will just end up sounding Google Translated to anyone who speaks the language natively. Talk about unprofessional! Instead, get help from someone who is fluent in the language you’re creating content for…

Full story at HubSpot.

Going global with social media.

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