International Business
When news recently broke that Twitter is joining forces with Mixi to compete against Facebook in Japan, the question on the lips of most Americans was, “What in the world is Mixi?”
Since MySpace long ago became what Seth Meyers of Saturday Night Live calls “the abandoned amusement park of the Internet,” people in the United States often see Facebook – and perhaps Twitter and Linkedin – as the social network for the world and are oblivious to alternatives like Japan’s Mixi.
Companies looking to include social media outreach in an international marketing plan must be aware that a U.S. Facebook marketing strategy is not a one-size-fits-all solution for best results in all other markets. International social media marketers must be familiar with local networks, communicate in the appropriate language, adapt to local culture and maintain an in-country presence with living, breathing people who keep it “social.”
International social networks
Yes, Facebook’s dominance is spreading internationally, but other social networks still have strong presences in other countries. In addition to Mixi in Japan, other notable sites include Orkut in Brazil and VKontakte in Russia.
Since Facebook access has been blocked in China since 2009, Qzone dominates that market with hundreds of millions of users. Other local Chinese networks like RenRen also benefit from protectionism against international competition. Perhaps something similar will happen in India if Facebook refuses to filter content as that government has recently requested.
“Orkut visitors in Brazil are far more engaged than their Facebook counterparts,” explains Internet marketing researcher comScore, Inc. in the whitepaper “The Rise of Social Networking in Latin America.” “An average visitor to Orkut spent 4.3 hours on the site in June 2011, while a visitor to Facebook.com spent 1.6 hours during the month.”
To achieve the best social media marketing results, international marketers will need to identify the top networks in each market and develop plans to adapt to the way international consumers behave online. This adaptation must include localization in the local language and culture to avoid some of the embarrassing scenarios that have discussed regularly in this column.
Multilingual networking
Social networks themselves have noticed a need to communicate with users in other languages, and many are localizing their user interfaces into dozens of languages. Facebook has been translated for an impressive 74 locales, largely thanks to translation crowdsourcing.
