Did you know you can create your LinkedIn profile or company page in more than one language? Have you thought about translating your posts or replies and aren’t sure where to start? Then read on.
LinkedIn boasts 740 million global users and is available in 24 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, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai and Turkish.
It’s important to remember that with LinkedIn your aim should be to engage an organisations employees – not the business page. They’re the ones using LinkedIn professionally and are likely to read and interact with content in their native language. They’re also the people who might be buyers or decision-makers within the business.
Using LinkedIn to network across different markets
We know that LinkedIn favours individual profiles over business pages. That’s why it’s important to consider translating and optimising the profiles of the people in your team. After all, it’s them who’ll be doing the networking.
So, if you have UK-based employees who’ll be talking to prospects overseas, you should consider creating secondary profiles in that market’s native language.
Users can create their profile in more than one language using the ‘View profile’ option, under the ‘Me’ icon and selecting ‘Add profile in another language’. LinkedIn doesn’t use machine translation tools to create this profile so you’ll need to do this yourself or use the services of a translator.
Just as a professional image is needed on LinkedIn, accurate translations are essential. Any mistakes could reflect poorly on your company image, so avoid using free online translation tools. It’s also important to consider business etiquette in that market – casual or more consumer-friendly updates may not be appropriate. Always ask your translation partner for guidance on global etiquette.
Engage a new market by localising your LinkedIn page
LinkedIn also allows businesses to run multilingual company pages. When you add a new company page in a different language, LinkedIn will automatically translate all the section headers into that language, but not your content.
Therefore, 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. Contact information and links to websites etc. 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, in fact, 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.
Another tool business leaders often use is LinkedIn articles. We see a lot of requests to translate these self-published posts. By writing them in your target audience’s language you can build influence in that market. The same goes for individual posts from your c-suits 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.
For more advice on translating different kinds of marketing content, including social media posts please get in touch. I’d be delighted to share our knowledge and experience.