GLOBAL SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY – THE WAY FORWARD

Every company now has a Facebook, Twitter and a LinkedIn profile. Why do they have them? What do they want to achieve? Is it really necessary? Well, these are some of the questions that you need to ask yourself. It does not matter of you are a small business owner or a big corporate; you need to know exactly what you’re doing with you’re company profile on social media.

Don’t just log in to you’re Twitter profile to post a link of the website or business you own.  You need to devise and plan a social media strategy that governs the motive behind every tweet on Twitter or post on Facebook.

Global social media strategy as the name suggests targets the audience worldwide. That means different languages, different time zones and most importantly – different mind sets. Don’t let this overwhelm you. It’s easy!

To begin with, you need to know whom you want to target; that is the audience. A global audience will have to be segregated based their language or region. You need to make sure which countries you want to target. This will help you develop the content for your strategy.

Once you’re done with this, set the social media goals. If you do not know what you set out to achieve, how will you judge the response to or success of your social media strategy?  What in particular do you want to achieve with this campaign?

Is it-increased traffic?  Or Brand reach/awareness?  Or is it – new market penetration? Selection of your business goal is completely based on your business. This can vary from strategy to strategy and campaign to campaign.

As previously discussed, a key component of a social media strategy is language. This depends on how you have segmented the countries you wan to target. There are few things you have to keep in mind with respect to languages like -  will you use multiple languages? Will you use a different profile for different language? This decision will be based on your resources and the bandwidth of your team and of course the ROI.

People from different countries have different mindsets and usually a tweet that might appeal to a Brit might not interest a Pakistani and vice versa. Not all the people respond to the same content in a way we might desire. Hence be prepared to come up against markets that might be difficult to penetrate.

A key point I would also like to make here is the importance of testing and trying different social networks. Don’t just stick to Facebook and Twitter. Try different social networks and some might just divert huge traffic and generate leads.