Social Media ROI webinar Q&A: Part I

Thanks to everyone who attended yesterday’s Social Media ROI webinar.

As promised during the session, I want to take a more detailed look at some of the questions that we didn’t have time to answer. And I’m starting with this one from Ralph, because it’s something we’ve been talking a lot about within Cision in recent weeks.

Ralph: Whats the best thing to do with Facebook and Twitter when you have two different markets you approach say for example UK and US?

This was a key issue when my US colleague Jay Krall and I ran a webinar in October last year that looked at social media in an international context.

In the blog post follow-up back then I wrote:

As is the case for corporate websites, it will be worth considering distinct Facebook presences (as well as presences on other global platforms, such as Twitter) for different markets if you have the resource to sustain regionally-specific content. This usually means having troops on the ground in the territories in question. If that’s not the case, you can still look at communicating in different languages at a campaign level – perhaps with multi-language Facebook Groups pointing back to an English-language Fan Page.

It’s with some relief (it wasn’t that long ago, after all) that I think I can still stand by this – though I might now go further in the case of Twitter.

Consolidating English language Twitter accounts (such as US and UK) that serve specific purposes (e.g. having a single customer service account) is good if you use a service such as CoTweet, or a Cision Social Media Engagement Console, to manage one account across multiple locations. At the same time, a global markets may well require responses in multiple languages, so creating discrete accounts to deal with these at once keeps each account focused and makes clear your dedication to the stakeholders in question.

Certainly, these multiple language accounts bring with them specialist resource demands, but at least with Twitter the demands are relatively light. If you can’t meet those, should you really be in the markets?