How Global Organisations Can Easily Increase Brand Exposure In The Local Market

The realisation that Facebook, Twitter and the likes aren’t necessarily leading the pack  in every country on the planet seems to have yet to prevail within many international organisations. In China, for instance, these Western social giants aren’t even accessible due to strict government censorship.

While managing a localised social media presence might simply not be feasible due to a lack of resources, here’s something that every international business with a country and / or language-targeted website should be doing to further increase user familiarity and brand exposure, regardless of the resources available to them. Because fact is, although rarely seen on global sites, it requires almost no effort to implement. What I’m referring to are locally adapted social sharing buttons for your country targeted sites.

Tourism Australia is one such organisation that not only provides fully translated sites in the local language but has deployed these sharing buttons for popular social media sites in the local market. In practice, this means that its country-site for Japan allows Japanese visitors to spread the word via homegrown social network Mixi. Chinese users, on the other hand, can do so via the sensationally popular microblogging service Sina Weibo (the Chinese Twitter-like service that has more than 320 million registered users), whereas Facebook clone and leading Russian social network Vkontakte is displayed to users in Cyrillic territory.

Japanese Site – Mixi

China – Sina Weibo

Russian Site – Vkontakte

If you’ve put in the effort to localise your website, why not fully leverage that hard and possibly expensive work by allowing your visitors to share your (hopefully) locally relevant content via their preferred social media sites? The amount of increased brand exposure and trust might surprise you.

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Immanuel Simonsen

Research Manager at Webcertain

As the Research Manager of multilingual web marketing agency Webcertain, Immanuel heads up the company’s global market research activities and large content marketing projects. He is the author of several reports and guides, including ‘The Essential Guide to Rel-Alternate-Hreflang’ and ‘The Webcertain Global Search and Social Report 2013’. Apart from being a tutor at the International Marketing School -- teaching online marketing professionals on business opportunities around the globe -- Immanuel is a regular speaker at the International Search Summit, a leading event series dedicated to multilingual search and social media marketing.

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