If you’re trying to reach customers overseas, social media is a great way to reach them and entice them to your website.
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As with any form of marketing, however, you need to be sure you’re following some Dos and Don’ts to make sure you’re not turning customers away, or worse still, creating bad PR for your business.
Here are our top tips.
Know your audience
While you’re no doubt working well with your current customers, creating Facebook posts that pop and Instagram reels that, ahem, reel in customers, what works in one country may not work in another.
You need to tailor posts for each country so you’re not in danger of creating anything that may be culturally sensitive and damaging your reputation before you even get started.
There are also the differences in how people use social media. For example, in Asia, most social media use is for sharing and downloading music or videos, whereas in India they like to use it for online gaming.
Make sure you’re on the right channel
If you’re targeting overseas customers, not all social platforms will be the same as local customers use, some may not even be available in other parts of the world.
South America for example has the highest number of Twitter users, whereas China doesn’t use any western social platforms at all, with 1.2 billion people using WeChat.
Consider emerging social media too. While predominantly a messaging service, WhatsApp is fast becoming a strong tool. It was purchased by Meta in 2014 and they’ve more recently started integrating the app into their Facebook and Instagram channels. So much so, it’s now more widely used than Facebook in many countries across the world.
Create relevant content
Depending on your product, you may need to adjust your content to make sure it resonates with audiences in different countries across the world.
Some cultures won’t like models with too few clothes, others may be turned off simply by the colour in the background (purple is considered to bring misfortune in Brazil and Thailand).
While many social media platforms can be seen worldwide, just like your website, customers prefer to visit a page which seems more local in its content, and maybe even in their own language, and this is also true when using English as the UK and US have different spelling and sentence structures.
Consider asking local social media marketing agencies to help you. They can create and target ads for you, or maybe even manage a local page that has strong local experience behind it to really help increase your ROI.
Stay up to date
Social media chances all the time and you’ll need to stay on top of new features and processes to make sure you don’t go off the boil.
Make sure you stay up to date with current trends and adjust content and targeting when needed, you may also need to change the channel you’re working on too, after all TikTok seemed to come from nowhere but it’s now got social media giant Meta drastically changing Instagram’s look and feel to keep up.
