The benefits of translating your Instagram posts

Translating your Instagram posts could be very beneficial in reaching more clients, although it’s the image that usually catches your eye. Instagram is the most popular social media network, the one that gains more users every year and has doubled its number of users in just two years.

That’s why on Instagram, we are targeting an audience that wants content in their own language or depending on their profile, in English. Therefore, it’s important to detect who our followers are and try to either write original posts in their languages or translate our Instagram posts for various languages.

 

Advantages of Instagram for companies

Instagram holds many advantages over other social networks, especially for B2C companies. Users interact with brands in an integrated way and in a context where they are in contact with friends, acquaintances and profiles they follow. An advertising campaign on Instagram can:

• Put our product in context in attractive photographs, with our products in the real world.
• Create a brand storytelling which combines the visual and written aspects, with short and striking stories.
• Appearing in stories alongside the people with whom our potential customers interact with means getting into their world!
• Successfully segment the audience of our Instagram knows its audience perfectly. We will therefore be able to choose very precise profiles for our campaigns.
• We can also integrate our sales channel into the app, giving the option to “Buy on Instagram”.

 

Why should you translate your Instagram posts?

On our path to internationalization, we can’t just post in our own language, we must reach our target market in other countries too. The Internet is global, and we must take advantage of this opportunity to find customers which other advertising channels can’t reach.

Instagram has a huge number of users and if we decide to go for a paid campaign, we should decide whether to make it multilingual or not. Why? Simply because we can expand our market. Here’s some ideas:

 

Have your Instagram in French or German

There’s no doubt about it, English is the language of the Internet. However, French and German are two major players in the European business market today. They are two of the main forces in the European economy and running of the EU.

If you’ve noticed that your audience works well (or even better) in these two languages, give yourself a pat on the back! You have found the answer: write and translate your Instagram posts into both French and German!

Make sure your posts are translated or revised by a native expert. There’s nothing worse than a badly written post… Also, be consistent and if you use the “Buy on Instagram”, link it to your catalogue in both French and German.

 

Instagram campaigns in different languages

This is something that any company who wishes to really connect with their audience should consider. Thanks to segmentation, we can individually target countries or language speakers with each campaign.

Therefore, having several multilingual Instagram campaigns which are linked to these language versions of our sales channel could be very effective. Yes, it means more work, and more costly, but the results will be worth it!

Keep in mind that users change their ways of seeing the world and communicating from one culture to another. A literal translation is a waste of time: you’re better to do a transcreation that responds to a good analysis of the unknown market you are addressing.

 

Have an Instagram account for every language or country

This option is the most resource consuming one and we’d only recommend it for companies with a lot of international business or ones that make most of their sales through Instagram. It’s the option chosen by giants such as Coca-Cola or Nike.

Having multilingual social networks means having a team of native professional communication experts behind you, this comes at a cost. The results will be optimal if the right strategy is used. Translation agencies can help you generate similar content for different languages and cultures by outsourcing it.

 

Translating your Instagram can be a competitive advantage

Today, social media has a lot of sales potential for certain business models and Instagram keeps on growing. Go for it if you want to internationalise your company and if your product would be accepted in foreign markets. Choose the option that best suits your business!

Remember that Internet sales don’t have to be limited to one country: it could be that our target is very specific and distributed, or that shipping costs aren’t that expensive. If this is your case, consider multilingual Instagram campaigns.

We can help you!