Social Media Accounts for International Strategies

[teconsite]

Hi!

we have a client that wants to begin doing business in Italy and France. As they don't sell directly to final customer, they need to generate brand awareness first in those market.

We are thinking of a content marketing strategy. As they are a furniture company and they create a very nice product, we think we can work a lot with pictures and articles. We think that Pinterest, Picassa and flickair will all be very important for the strategy.

For sure, we know they should create a Facebook Account for each country, but what happens with twitter, pinterest, flickair, youtube ...?  Should they also create an account for each country? They are not a very big company, and I am not sure about if they would be able to generate enough content for each account if they have an account per country.

What do you think? One account per country or can we avoid that for some social networks?

Thank you!

[FedeEinhorn]

After considering my answer and Sylvana's, I would go with her solution. Separate pages. She is right, I also like scrolling over fan pages and it could be confusing if posts are in different languages.

+1 Sylvana

[teconsite]

Thanks for your anwsers! 
I see that you both agree with the Image Networks strategy. I thought that we should have a separete account for Facebook. Now, I am not sure...

What about Google Plus?

Someone can give us more opinions about Facebook?

[BridalHotspot]

Hi Federico,

If you were targeting one language then I would have agreed with you but in this case it is two different languages of people that 'don't like' to speak other languages. Even if you can target people per post individually, most people like to scroll through a page's posts and images so they would still see the other posts in different languages. I don't think that it costs a lot of effort to make 2 separate pages and target each country in their own language. If you're good at what you're doing you might even find trends specific to each country and thus make it more relevant to each country.

But again, this is just my humble opinion

[FedeEinhorn]

Hi Sylvana,

You can target Facebook posts to individual Countries (among other options), so others following your page won't see it in the feed.

On the other hand, I completely agree on the "picture networks." I wrote a post last year about that: A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

[BridalHotspot]

I have to disagree with Federico about the single Facebook account.

I know Germans and I know French people and they don't really like to speak other languages than their own. I would definitely make separate Facebook and Twitter accounts if I were you, so that you can target them in their own language. Trying to target them in English will not work or at least not as well as you would like it to.

Pinterest and Flickr on the other hand are based on images, so you can have a single account and just add hashtags (for Pinterest) or text in both languages as the images mostly speak for themselves. Also I do think that images add a lot of value because a good picture is worth more than a thousand words.

This of course is just my humble opinion.

[FedeEinhorn]

You can only target specific Countries with Facebook, they offer the ability to target a specific audience with every post. Then, Twitter, pinterest and flickr don't.

Following your reasoning, you should go with a single account on Facebook, Pinterest and Flickr and separate accounts for Twitter.

Pinterest and Flickr doesn't offer to much value aside from the images, and if you need some text, you can put both languages within the same post.