How to craft engaging content for global social media
For organisations expanding internationally, social media is often a primary touchpoint for building awareness and accelerating demand generation. B2B buyers are increasingly turning to platforms like LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and Reddit to research suppliers, compare options and validate reputation. In fact, 75% of B2B buyers use social media to make buying decisions, with 50% using LinkedIn as a trusted source.
The opportunities for showcasing how your product or service solves problems for customers, or what your internal culture is like, are enormous. However, the risks can scale quickly if social media activity spans multiple regions and cultures. A phrase that resonates in one market can confuse or offend in another, and a literal translation or poorly timed post can create reputational issues.
So, how can brands successfully develop and implement their global social media marketing strategies?
Choosing the right platforms
With so many social channels out there, brands need to be strategic about which ones to go for based on the target audience behaviour and business objectives.
Brands in China might want to prioritise WeChat due to its popularity and features that allow for service updates and commerce. In Poland, Facebook remains widely used, with LinkedIn growing in popularity, having attracted over 3 million members. YouTube is the leading social media app in the United States, and as the world’s second largest search engine, it can be a strong driver of brand discovery and traffic.
The practical approach to adopting the right platform is to build a portfolio by market, guided by research into where audiences spend the most time and how they prefer to consume information.
Deciding on one global presence or regional pages
Whether to run a single global channel or build regional pages should be a strategic decision, not an organisational reflex. The choice hinges on a few practical questions:
- How different are buyer needs and languages across priority markets?
- How mature is brand awareness and the local sales motion?
- Is there enough high quality, market-specific content to sustain a cadence that earns attention?
- Will community management be handled by people who understand local etiquette and can respond in time?
On LinkedIn, for example, a global company page can be used to carry the core narrative while regional pages or Showcase Pages serve markets where language, regulation or product mix demand a distinct presence.
Many B2B firms adopt a hybrid model in which the global page leads on vision, proof points and flagship content, and regional pages focus on local case studies, events and are used for paid promotion to maximise ROI and regional audience penetration.
Shifting from translation to true localisation
Now, the plan and content calendar should move into focus. A common and costly error is believing a successful message merely needs to be Google-translated. Translation delivers basic comprehension, but the true challenge is localisation. This ensures content is not only linguistically accurate but also culturally appropriate and genuinely impactful.
Over the years, we’ve witnesses multiple missteps from well-known global brands which showed a lack of understanding of cultural nuances.
One example is the Dolce & Gabbana’s Eating with Chopsticks campaign with videos featuring an Asian woman attempting to eat classic Italian dishes and a male Mandarin voiceover ‘mansplaining’ how to eat them properly, pronouncing words incorrectly on purpose to mock Chinese speech. The entire campaign was widely criticised in China for stereotyping and being disrespectful, leading to a cancelled Shanghai runway show a public apology from the founders.
Another example is Chase Bank’s #MondayMotivation tweet which was read as shaming US customers for small purchases during a time of financial pressure, drawing public rebukes from lawmakers and forcing a swift tweet deletion and apology.
In the UK, Burger King posted “Women belong in the kitchen” on International Women’s Day to promote a culinary scholarship for female employees. The intended reveal sat in follow-up tweets that many never saw while the first tweet remained live for hours, attracting abusive comments and forcing Burger King’s social media team to spend the rest of the day issuing apologies.
In B2B settings where credibility and trust compound over time, grounded localisation relies on on-the-ground expertise in phrasing, tone and timing so that idioms and visuals land as they were intended to.
Measuring social media campaigns
When measuring social media campaigns, leadership teams want to see more than just a number of ‘likes’. They want to see movement against objectives such as qualified pipeline in priority markets, faster sales cycles or increased share of voice with specific buyer roles. That requires a framework that separates leading indicators from commercial results and reports, both in a way that enables decisions.
Leading indicators show whether content is resonating with the right people. Comments on product videos and LinkedIn newsletters can indicate depth of attention from the followers. Save rates and reposts suggest ongoing relevance of core narratives, while clicks through to web pages and quality of form fills show whether interest is converting into intent.
In addition, it’s important to be tracking follower demographics regularly as this helps provide an accuracy check on audience fit, while regional growth patterns can highlight where brand traction is building and where targeting or local content requires refinement.
Global social works when intent, context and evidence align. With a strong centre, informed local judgement and metrics that track real progress, brands earn attention in market and convert it into outcomes that matter to leadership.
If you need support crafting engaging content for your global social media channels, get in touch with us to discuss your goals, markets and a strategy that delivers impactful results. Contact us here: hello@winprgroup.com