Global Social Media Usage and the Language Factor 

Whitepaper: Sponsored by Lionbridge and Executive Education in Web Globalization, John Cook School of Business, Saint Louis University  

Understanding how social media is delivered, consumed, and leveraged around the world can help global marketers to better develop, position, and deliver global content to achieve social media marketing objectives, such as increasing website traffic and lead generation, improving multilingual search engine visibility, increasing global brand awareness, and most importantly, enhancing global revenues. Thus, the broad objective of this whitepaper is to explore global differences in social media diffusion and usage. The paper will analyze patterns of social media usage among global social media users from more than 20 countries and explore how online users are translating social media content for global consumption.

More specifically, the whitepaper presents the results of a large-scale, 2010 global survey of approximately 3,800 social media users exploring:

How users from different countries use social media for business and personal use

• The most popular global social media platforms, in which countries
• The top languages used to generate global social media content
• User preferences for English versus local language with regard to social media content
• Global user propensity to translate social media content
• Methods used by consumers to translate social media content

Download Whitepaper (pdf, English)  

Webinar: Presented by Kathleen Bostick, Vice President of Global Marketing at Lionbridge  

In this presentation, Kathleen presents her research in global social media that includes a case study on the Lionbridge global social media survey. She describes the lessons learned in developing a survey in 20+ languages and using social media — including blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and e-mail — to distribute it. She also takes a look at the language factor and how companies are addressing it (or not) in their social media outreach, providing new insight as to how the world is using social media.

View this Webinar Replay