Which are you more interested in, making money or gaining customers and making money at the same time?
According to statistics, there are over 4.65 billion active social media users worldwide. This means that now more than ever, we should attract their attention, make them proud of our services, and achieve our goals in the most effective way.
The benefits of using social media
Social media for business is no longer just an option. It is an integral way to reach your clients, build your brand, and gain valuable insights. When promoting our business on social media, we should learn how to use it and how to provide clients with the most relevant information on the topics they are interested in. Sometimes we should find the most creative way to let them know about something new, in this case, to help them keep up with the latest trends they may be interested in.
The benefits of using social media include:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Promoting content, products/services
- Learning more about your customers
- Increasing market reach
- Developing your brand in different ways
- Collecting and sharing ideas from retailers and creative businesses
- Partnering with influencers
- Building loyalty
- Increasing website traffic
- Staying up to date on industry news, etc
To count up the benefits of social media for business growth, we need time and a long list of points, but on the other hand, using it the wrong way can have a very negative impact on your business, even if it is a small business or a corporation. Therefore, we should pay attention to managing them and using them properly. Translating your marketing content is also an important step to reach new customers who speak a language other than English.
Below, we’ve listed 5 translation mistakes most brands make on social media:
Use of automatic translation
Of course, we sometimes look for the fastest way to get things done, such as completing an order, baking a cake, or even selling a product or providing a service. But eventually, the effects can hit us in all the wrong ways.
The translations that come from the machine help us a lot, and they are useful for all kinds of purposes, but before we post something very unique and important, we should proofread to avoid mistakes and get the correct message to the audience. These translations can be used not only for your social media but for your website content as well when you’re planning to obtain the best web design.
Using multiple languages for one account
The best way to reach a larger audience is to create a separate account for each language we want to target because the audience won’t have time to search for the language they are interested in if we don’t separate them. The easiest way is to create something in one language and translate it to other languages, but this is not the most effective way. Therefore, make sure you have separate accounts for each language when targeting a specific multilingual audience.
Translate Images
Perfect content, such as text that best reflects the company, will not work if other content, such as images, is not translated. For images, the colors used should be taken into account. For example, if the color black dominates a photo, we should be careful how we display it.
In addition, the symbols in the photos may mean something unique and valuable in one context but may be offensive in another.
In conclusion, we should emphasize the importance of carefully translating images.
Staying monolingual
Multilingual social media marketing, like translation in general, can be a minefield for businesses. The problem is that we are familiar with multiple languages and know the expression in one language but not in the other.
Many things get lost in translation, or you find that the spelling of a word in one form changes the entire meaning of the sentence. We should take care to translate multilingually, or rather, we should remain monolingual.
The culture is not maintained
When preparing your marketing materials for your target audience, it is important to consider their culture.
For each translated sentence, the translator must be able to decide what the sentence really means, not necessarily what it literally means, in the cultural context, and convey that meaning in a way that makes sense, not only in the target language but also in the context of the target culture. The best digital marketing services include the proper cultural references.
Translation services take care of your social media translations that require special care and attention to detail. It is also the best decision to hire a professional team for the cultural part, which is an important part of the translation. Culture gives different contexts to the language. The same words translated from one culture to another take on slightly or radically different meanings. Sometimes these differences in meaning represent slight or strong differences in value that can be critical in translation.
Conclusion
Social media marketing effectively allows businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and customers. People discover, learn about, follow, and buy from brands on social media. So if you’re not on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, you’re missing out! But it’s so easy to make mistakes that can put you in dire situations and generally destroy your brand.
You should be careful when translating to another culture, another market. You can make it easier by using machine translations, but they are not very effective because, after all, they are machines and not humans. Using a human brain to highlight the company’s performance is the best decision. An expert translation agency may cost, but the benefits of a professional translation will produce many happy faces at the end of the day.
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