Engaging with a global audience can be difficult, especially if your budget and resources are low. Your followers will already have an interest in your brand, so you can assume their common interest is your industry and company. This is a great starting point, but how can you ensure your content will reach and appeal to your global audience?
Emma Goble, Social Media Editor from global fashion brand River Island, gives her advice on how SMEs can strategically engage with a worldwide audience and overcome difficult challenges.
Plan
Before you launch a campaign, you need have a goal in place. Think about what you want to achieve, whether that may be raising awareness about a new product, building your following, or generating more conversation. As a general process the points below will help to structure your campaign strategy:
- Define your audience
- Set a clear goal
- Decide on the messages you want to present
- Evaluate
To develop your strategy, experiment with different content mediums and assess what your followers engage with. Don’t just stick to text, visual is huge on social platforms, so consider video, as well as images. Writing sporadically on social media can have a negative effect, so plan to post content consistently. Plan your year’s strategy by listing holidays, awareness days, and major events that you could talk to your audience about.
Scheduling
Social media never sleeps and is a constant stream of conversation from people all over the world. If you’re targeting people internationally, whether it is in one or ten other countries, the stream of conversation is going to keep on going. Thankfully there are scheduling tools that can help to keep the communication flowing. Hootsuite is great for scheduling posts ahead of time across a number of different platforms. Facebook also has its own scheduling tool for both personal and business profiles.
Keep in mind that scheduling is only a one way conversation, so it’s important that your followers are aware that your account may be unmonitored for a short time. Vodafone’s customer service Twitter page is a great example of how a brand communicates this to its followers. Like Vodafone, it is worth suggesting an alternative on how to get in contact with you and to let your followers know when you will get back to them.
Targeting
Some companies opt to have separate Twitter profiles based on countries to better target and engage with their audience. However, as an SME you may not have the resources to monitor different pages or outsource to agencies. That is where targeting tools come in.
Facebook has a feature in settings to help to target your post to be seen by your audience in a specific location or language. This is a really useful feature, especially if you are targeting customers that speak a different language or celebrating country specific holidays. For example, with Australia recently celebrating Australia Day and we were able to involve bloggers in an Australia Day guide and send it out to our Aussie audience on Facebook.
With these tools, you will be able to better target you audience and create useful conversations around your brand. Be sure to research each country to see what the most popular social platforms are. Twitter and Facebook don’t always come out on top.
