Building a

GLOBAL + LOCAL Social Media Strategy

INTRODUCTION
In todays digital world, brands can easily take their marketing efforts global
on social media. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram offer
broader access to brand product and content, while also giving brands
the opportunity to join customer conversations and resolve queries and
complaints quickly.
But, when a company goes global, new issues and opportunities arise
around localization of strategy and messaging. As a social media marketer,
you need to decide whether to build a social strategy that relies on distinct,
local teams that align closely with local culture, or maintain a single, global
messaging strategy that is developed at a centralized headquarters, or do
some mix of both.
To properly work through this decision, you must understand the differences
between global and local social media marketing strategies, the pros and
cons of maintaining each, and how to measure your results to determine
how well your strategy is working.

THE GLOBAL-LOCAL DIVIDE

To begin, well define a global versus a local strategy:

Global: A brands messaging comes from one centralized team and is

consistent across every market globally. Messaging may be translated into
local languages but its content doesnt change.

Local: A brands communications are created or customized by teams that

live near and appeal to an area.

Answers vary. Brands that rely on walk-in patronage may need a local
presence. However, with a global-only approach, a web-based brand can
monitor and control all aspects of its communications more efficiently.
Making a choice between a global and local strategy means knowing
your audience, understanding your resources, and having solid data to
make your decision.

When social media marketing was relatively new, the choice to develop
a global or local presence wasnt nearly as hard. Brands tended to stay
within their home country and use their first language, giving them a local
presence by default.
Consider Nike, the well-known American athletic retailer that now has
a large global and localized presence. Early social strategies from Nike
appeared to be tailored to an English-speaking customer living in the
northern hemisphere, as the brands first Tweet shows. Nikes first
presence was local because they were based in the US.
Now, due to technologys globalizing effects, consumers have more
opportunity to seek out brands that are farther from home. As this
happens, brands adapt by catering to different locations. But, how local
should brands go? Where exactly should they be spending money and effort?

Nikes first tweet on December 29, 2011 addresses an English

speaking and likely American audience.

LOCAL VS. GLOBAL: THE PROS AND CONS

Each social media strategy local or global has pros and cons.
Understanding these tradeoffs will help your brand decide which type
of presence you need, or whether you want something in between:
a global-local presence.

Local presence
Many small companies start with a local social media strategy simply
because their products audience lives in their local community. As they
grow and move into other areas of the world, they often switch to a global
social media strategy because they dont have the resources to support a
local approach for multiple locations.
Local strategies have the benefit of relevance in their target market.
Marketers in local markets can easily build campaigns around products
that are appropriate to factors like seasons and holidays. These marketers
also benefit from cultural and linguistic knowledge, such as nicknames for
neighborhoods or news about local celebrities.

Maintaining local social media presences, however, becomes more

challenging as a brand expands outside its original market. Brands with
multiple physical locations may find themselves struggling to produce a
message that is both cohesive and relevant in many geographies.
Brands can stick with a local approach, setting up teams in new locations
that know the culture of their new locations. Or, they can move to a global
approach, keeping a single location the source of their social media
messaging strategy.

A local strategy makes sense for

businesses like restaurants, stores,
or any brand with walk-in locations.

Global presence
Having a global social media strategy helps ensure messaging is consistent
across markets and channels because the brands centralized marketing
team produces the messages. This approach works for brands with many
different branches that want a consistent voice. These companies might be
marketing to businesses and need a more polished image.
An example of a global marketing strategy occurred when Manchester City
Football Club in the UK translated their website into 13 different languages.
This made it easier for fans outside the UK to access team news, shop, and
connect, but kept the messaging consistent.

Global strategies work well for

brands with international appeal
and a largely web-based audience.
Despite these benefits, building a global presence is sometimes a difficult
task. Brands can spend large amounts of time trying to craft campaigns and
messages that will speak to an international audience. What seems normal
in one culture may hold a different meaning in another.

You can get a worldwide view of your social media fan base with
the Simply Measured Facebook Global Pages report

THE GLOBAL-LOCAL PRESENCE

You may find that neither a purely global nor local approach satisfies all of
your marketing needs. Maybe its best to have a centralized group that sets
the tone for messaging then collaborates with on-site teams around the
world. For example, you might offer local customer support on Twitter in all
time zones. Theres no one-size-fits-all presence a business must have.
A global-local strategy allows for customization based on target markets.
Before deleting one-off accounts or attempting to change your strategy
from one type of presence to another, here are questions to ask yourself:

1. Who is our audience and where are they located?

Knowing your audience is essential for deciding on a strategy that
best suits your needs. Looking at users by region can help you decide
whether there are regions that need a specific local presence. Your
brand should consider both your audience and your competitors
audiences in making this decision. Competitors efforts often offer
clues about where you could expand.

2. What is our audience looking for?

When your customers look for football fan gear are they searching for
NFL teams (American football) or FIFA teams (international soccer)? You
need a digital strategy that puts your products in front of the customer
in an appropriate way.

3. What are our strengths and weaknesses?

Youll want to determine your strengths and weaknesses in terms of
resources and skills. For example, a weakness may be lack of funding for
translators to bring a global campaign to certain areas of the world. A
strength may be having local offices that can handle a regions needs,
including adaptations for language and culture.

4. How do we build a cohesive strategy across all channels?

Internet users have come to expect that brands are consistent, whether
the brands presence is in the US, Europe, South America, Africa, or
Southeast Asia. This means you need to be strategic in how you label
local profiles, or how your global presence responds to local needs.
Besides cohesiveness across localities, brands must adopt a cohesive
strategy across channels. This means that messaging on all social
networks should align with product and branding guidelines.

5. How do we know if were doing it right?

The recurring question when it comes to social media is how to both
benchmark and measure the outcome. A good social media strategy is
based on data both as a guide for creating global or local personas
and for determining success. Being able to easily review data improves
the efficiency of creating and implementing an audience-friendly brand
persona, whether global or local.

With the expansion of paid media, data is also key in being able to
attribute success to the right things. Knowing how your paid, owned,
and earned media help drive customer acquisition and engagement
across your global or local presences will help improve resource
allocation. Furthermore, it can help make reporting on and analyzing
results more efficient.
Building a social media strategy with the right combination of global and
local components is integral to competitive success. You need to balance
the standardization that comes with a global presence, and the locationbased customization of a local presence, to offer a cohesive and customeroriented experience across all social media channels.

A good social media strategy is

based on data both as a guide for
creating global or local personas
and for determining success.

GATHERING THE DATA

How does an established brand find the right way to appeal to local
audiences and still adhere to their global social media guidelines? Using data
to compare your current brand presence against regional trends, you can
create competitive global-local strategies that address customer needs,
regardless of location. For example, if Nike knows they have a large German
audience that is interested in soccer they can offer products and specials
tailored to that audience. They may also run a similar campaign in other
countries with audiences that are interested in soccer.
What does your current presence look like?
To compare audience data that will uncover gaps in your social media
strategy, you must know what type of social presences your brand has. You
need to find out where your audience is located, how often they engage,
and how well your current social media policy serves content to your
audience. Ask yourself these questions:

1. Is our brands presence global or local?

Examine what kind of presence your brand has and compare your
current strategy against your business needs. For example, many
brands start with a local presence and then branch out to different
locations based on that strategy.

2. Do we have a cohesive policy around branding and image?

For brands looking to build more local social media teams,
understanding and communicating the fundamentals of how your
brand should be represented can alleviate messaging problems
around voice, tone, and style.
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3. Who are our target audiences?

Comparing your current audience to your potential target audiences
is essential for deciding where you need to focus your resources.
First, gather information about your current audience that will help
you identify topics that your customers care about. You can then
research those topics or keywords in Tweets by people who are not yet
customers. By studying keywords in potential markets youll discover
areas of opportunity.
Data on your current audience also provides information on engagement
trends, such as where your audience is when they engage, their age,
gender, and which platforms they use most. These factors will help you
decide how, where, and when to strengthen your social media efforts
with a more local or global approach.

The Simply Measured Facebook Page Insights Report provides information

about your audience, such as age, gender, and location.

4. What are our brands current strengths and areas for

opportunity as a global and a local entity?
Your brands current social media campaign performance will help to
assess strengths and weaknesses on both a global and a local scale.
You will be able to identify areas where you could customize for certain
customers and highlight areas in which your strategy lacks cohesion.
For example, you may find that certain keywords work better in certain
regions. Your competitors might have a better presence in a region
where you have a large, engaged audience. You could find that your
business (and audience) would benefit from using local languages.

WHERE CAN YOUR BRAND EXPAND?

With data about strengths and areas for improvement, you can determine
how to expand your brands presence. There are a few factors that play
into the decision of whether and where you should build or reinforce your
social presence.

Location: Looking at the countries where your audience engages allows

you to pinpoint locations that have a large potential for new customers.
Geo-location data will help alert you to locations where you may not
provide customized service options, but have a large enough following or
fan base to warrant a local team.

Language: Consider the languages your audience uses. If your brand

services a large number of people who speak a different language than
that of your brand, you may benefit from translating your global messaging
into that language and offering customer service and other options in
that language. Or, you can put a local team in that area to work with that
community more closely.

LANGUAGE

English
(US)

English
(UK)

Spanish

French

English
(Pirate)

Leet Speak

TOTAL FANS

2,083

148

Knowing that a large percentage of their Twitter audience is GMT -5, this
sample brand can assume that many of their followers are based on the
East Coast of the United States.

Facebook Insights provided by Facebook show which languages your audience uses.

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Competition: Your competitors social media presences are great sources

of information when searching for locations that have a demand for your
product. You can get an idea of international localization efforts by looking
at branch profiles. For example, Doves Brazilian audience size of nearly five
million people shows that they have been successful in building a localized
experience in that region. Doves competitors may consider expanding their
own presence in that region to remain competitive.
By comparing data about a competitor, and the location and languages
used by your audience, you can make more effective social media
strategy decisions.

CONCLUSION
Choosing between or blending a centralized global presence and a
diverse set of local presences requires research and analysis to ensure
success. You should keep your audience in mind at all times: who are they,
what do they need, and does their brand fulfill that need. This monitoring
means periodically collecting data on languages, localities, and trends in
keywords and topics.

This graph from the Simply Measured Facebook Global Pages report shows that Dove
has large followings in Brazil, India, and the Philippines. Based on this information, a
competitive brand may decide to expand their presence in any of these regions.

A brand must consider factors that come with each type of presence,
such as controlling messaging or hiring new talent in target regions. With
careful planning, however, you will find that you can tailor global and local
strategies to meet specific business needs. In addition, determining what
type of presence your brand needs can help you target audiences you may
not previously have considered.

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