The best performing and most valuable content provides relevance for the user as well as the brand with a great respect for the context. What is happening right now in your local community? And do you take local context into consideration when creating Social Media content for your global brand?
We believe that it takes a local to tab into a certain location’s tone of voice and cultural understanding. It takes a Community Manager who grew up in the given location and is based there. Only then it will be possible to create authentic branded content that works for a local market, embracing the local trends, traditions and humor. The popular social media platforms support this fact with a range of functions.
- First the “Nearby” feature helped local businesses to be discovered by letting Facebook users in the local areas recommend them to their friends.
- Another step was the Global Pages feature highlighting the value of local community management. International brands were now able to have one global identity – a global page – directing users to a localized version of the page.
- Two months ago Facebook released yet another feature in the name of localized content called Local Awareness Ads that lets businesses target the people in their community with local ads – taking the “Nearby”-feature to another level.
Instagram is a location-based platform by nature, since location has been part of the founders visions since the beginning. Users are encouraged to location-tag their content, in order to create engagement to their own profiles. This automatically ends up being customer engagement for brands, when users tag a certain geographic place, shop or restaurant.
Twitter lets brands geo-target organic tweets to specific countries through an application created in collaboration with Sprout Social.
Pinterest is about to launch “Promoted Pins” (though only available in the US for now), which lets businesses target the right (local) community.
So… what to take away from this? By creating local pages, handles and profiles, you can increase your brand’s international reach and engagement. So why not get started?!