Businesses today are as active on social media sites as are individuals and most recently a Twitter account has proved to be more and more favourable for businesses. The main aim of a Twitter account is to reach out to customers and actively engage in conversations with followers. By doing this, product benefits are passed via Twitter accounts so sales have grown. The millennial generation itself has revealed how important Twitter is in influencing what people buy.
As with much social media content, that which is posted on Twitter in a particular language typically remains in that language. This basically means if a company announces the marketing of a new product line in Chinese, only those that understand the language will freely be able to understand the message. This means if you are trying to capture the European market you will be missing millions of potential customers by not using professional translation services to help market your product in another language. The Italians accessing your product information will tweet about it in Italian, too.
Twitter has proved to be a very successful marketing tool for company giants such as General Motors, Ford, Marriott International and Jet Blue. They have primarily been tweeting to the domestic market and have not yet stretched to getting their Tweets translated into a multitude of languages that may drive sales even higher. At the moment the best translators are of the human kind but they would have to work 24/7 to keep up with Twitter translations.
Machine document translation tools are available but they have not proven their worth due to their accuracy problems and are not worth the risk for mass translation projects such as round the clock tweet translations. If the translating can’t be monitored by human translators then any inaccuracies will be left undetected and may tarnish a company’s image.
Global Branding and Social Marketing
Branding and marketing on Twitter are available to both big and small companies and are a great tool for building customer loyalty and influencing purchasing choices of consumers. If these marketing and branding messages are shared only in a single language these companies lose out on influencing a large, untapped market.
Posts on social media and in particular Tweets sometimes go viral which means a message is spread on a mass scale spontaneously. This is a great chance for a business to spread its product news but even better if such posts were translated into a multitude of languages by professional translation services in Australia.