How to Translate LinkedIn Pages, Company Profiles and Posts
Did you know you can create your LinkedIn profile or company page in more than one language? Have you thought about using LinkedIn to translate your posts or replies and aren’t sure where to start? If you want to learn how to translate a LinkedIn page, read on.
LinkedIn boasts 930 million global users and is available in 26 languages. While it’s always been popular as a recruitment tool, in the past few years it’s become an essential marketing tool. Newer capabilities like InMail, have led to many global companies translating LinkedIn posts and profiles for their global customers. After all, what’s the point of drawing in international customers if they can’t read what you have to say?
Localising your organisation’s social media profiles and content is an excellent way to build brand awareness, trust and professional relationships. It can also help you stand out from the crowd as not all companies go the extra mile with translating and localising their LinkedIn content. But before you copy and paste your profile straight into a translation bot, here are some things to consider.
Is Your Target Market on LinkedIn?
Unless blocked by governments (for example, in Russia), anyone can access this platform around the world. LinkedIn currently supports: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish and Ukrainian. While some of these languages are well-established and others belong to fast-growing economies, they are all important for international business, depending on your niche.
In terms of popularity, the United States leads the market with more than 200 million LinkedIn users (23%), followed by India, which has 99 million users (11%). The platform is more popular with male users (57%) and younger users with 60% of members aged 25-34 years old.
While LinkedIn lists over 63 million companies, it’s important to remember you should aim to engage an organisation’s employees, not the business page. Individuals use the platform professionally and are likely to read and interact with content LinkedIn translates into their native language. They’re also the people who might be buyers or decision-makers within the business.
Engage a New Market by Localising Your LinkedIn Page
LinkedIn also allows businesses to run multilingual company pages. In practice, this means that individual users can visit your company page and read it in their language. For example, if you’ve translated your page into French, French-speaking users who visit your company page will see it displayed in French. If you’ve chosen not to translate your profile or page, the French visitor will have to read it in English – or whatever your default language setting is.
When you add a new company page in a different language, LinkedIn translates all the section headers into that language automatically. However, it doesn’t translate your content, so you’ll need to translate this information into the target language.
Instead of translating your English company description directly into the target language, you should localise your marketing content to make it more relevant to the people you wish to do business within that country. Research shows that locally targeted content has six times more engagement than information designed for the global market. Information such as contacts and links, as well as the inclusion of cultural nuances, can all be localised with country or market-specific details.
Translating LinkedIn Posts Into Multiple Languages
Once your company pages are set up in your target languages, and key personnel have multilingual profiles, you need to think about how to translate LinkedIn posts. Most clients we work with create a monthly content calendar of social media updates aligned with the target market. These are translated and scheduled for publication.
Don’t forget about videos as well. Video content is hugely popular on LinkedIn, According to Aberdeen Group, brands that use video marketing grow their revenue 49% faster than companies that don’t. You may want to consider translating these as well, whether that means straightforward subtitles or voice dubbing. Read our tips for video translations here.
Another tool business leaders often use is LinkedIn articles. We see a lot of requests to translate these self-published posts. By using LinkedIn to translate and share them in your target audience’s language, you can build influence in that market. The same goes for individual posts from your C-suite profiles.
It’s a two-way street
Translating brand messages and marketing content on LinkedIn provides an opportunity to network with other businesses and build relationships with your target market. You’ll probably require some ad-hoc translation work so that your business can reply to comments or have a conversation with prospects overseas. Many translation service providers offer marketing translation services including social media engagement.
It’s one thing to talk about how to translate a LinkedIn page, but really your content needs localisation rather than Google copy-and-paste translations. Each business is unique and its LinkedIn content needs extra attention depending on the target audience’s language, location and culture.
We love sharing our knowledge and expertise on this, and many other language, culture, translation, and localisation-related subjects. Please do get in touch, our friendly team is always very happy to help.
Call us on +44 (0) 1926 335 681 or email info@comtectranslations.com.