In October, Facebook launched its Global Pages framework, which provides a helping hand for businesses that cater to an international audience. Simply put, by allowing organisations to merge all separate local brand pages under one URL, it allows for brands to benefit from their global scale through a single global brand identity, however without sacrificing local relevance.
The new framework will also make reviewing and benchmarking of local page performances more transparent and efficient (a solution from Facebook is currently in the makings), not to mention the apparent benefits of a single URL in offline promotional material.
So far it all sounds good, right? But don’t be fooled; this is far from a one-size-fits-all solution for international businesses. If you aren’t able to answer the following questions with a clear and sounding yes, you should seriously consider whether this is the most ideal set-up for your global Facebook presence:
1. Do we have a monthly ad spend of 10K USDs or higher on Facebook (or do we intend to)?
You will only qualify for this set-up if you spend enough on advertising to justify a named Account Manager. If you don’t currently spend anything near that amount and have no intention of doing so in the future, then please stop reading.
2. Do we have enough local content to support fully localised pages?
Many international brands have up until now employed a single page approach and used Facebook’s targeting tool to localise country- or region-specific posts, whilst also sending out broader appealing content to all fans. With the Global Pages set-up, however, you won’t be able to publish global content across all your local pages. As a consequence, you’d need to produce more locally tailored content if going with this approach.
3. Do we have in-market Community Managers?
As this set-up centralises the global Facebook presence, it could urge one to think that it’s reasonable to do the same with staff, i.e. have all Community Managers situated in one central physical location. There would be obvious advantages of doing so, such as improved communication and coordination, resulting in a higher degree of brand consistency. However, as Social happens in real-time, you’d need to have your Community Managers based in-market to keep a finger on the pulse and be able to respond in a timely manner as conversations may catch fire. True, you can overcome timezone differences by scheduling your post updates, but who’s going to follow up on those updates once they go live? Remember, there’s no point in getting to the party if everyone’s left already.
On top of this, having natives managing your local social presence in-market also means you don’t have to put your faith in unreliable machine translation services to partially localise what might be a globally resonating post.
Want to turbocharge your global social strategy? Attend the International Social Media Summit @ SMX Social in Las Vegas, December 4th. Book now.
Immanuel Simonsen
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