Social media, marketing and different languages

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Kirigiwi
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Social media, marketing and different languages

Post by Kirigiwi »

I'm curious as to what others do when their target guests speak different languages. So far I have thought mostly about marketing in English to English speaking people in Europe, but as my property is pretty close to Rome I'm also getting guests from there coming out for short breaks, and would like to do more now to reach them, especially for shoulder season bookings.
My facebook page is pretty active and I was thinking of running some Facebook ads targeted at people in Rome.
Is it worth having a separate Facebook page for them in Italian? Or writing posts in both languages? Or some posts in one language and some in another? Might potential guests or followers find it off putting to see a stream of posts in a language they don't know?
The same goes for Twitter and Google+ which I'm aiming to get to grips with more over the next months.

I'm also curious about websites and blog posts in particular, bilingual posts or keep the 2 sites separate?
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kevsboredagain
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Post by kevsboredagain »

I view Facebook as multi lingual and assume that most non English people using it are used to all the "rubbish" you get on there, which is in English. I therefore make my limited posts in English and sometimes share some French stuff.

For websites, I have 3 languages, which are the ones I am comfortable handling. I use only one domain but having a country specific domain could be an advantage.
tavi
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Post by tavi »

My guests are usually Portuguese or British - about 50/50. I post on FB in both languages, and usually keep it short to avoid too many mistakes! My website is in both languages.
Gordo
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Re: Social media, marketing and different languages

Post by Gordo »

Kirigiwi wrote:I'm curious as to what others do when their target guests speak different languages
Homeaway on pay per booking (Spanish let). Automatically translated for their sister sites in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Italy is homelidays.it). This year I had bookings from 4x French, 1x Spanish and 1x German, none of which I'd been expecting nor targeting.

They (HA) seem to get a fair amount of grief on here but I'd say as it's totally free to try then why not?
Kirigiwi wrote:My facebook page is pretty active and I was thinking of running some Facebook ads targeted at people in Rome.
Is it worth having a separate Facebook page for them in Italian? Or writing posts in both languages? Or some posts in one language and some in another?
Sounds like a lot of hard work to me! Pretty sure you can just do it in English and use a FB translate app. Choosing locations and demographics is pretty cool on FB. I needed to fill a 2 week summer slot that had been cancelled at short notice so I setup a £2 per day like-building exercise and planned to run it for 2 weeks at a cost of £28. By the 4th day I'd got the 2 weeks sold. There's a lot of crap/bogus ID stuff on there but if you think of it as purely a numbers game then it's certainly worth a try. My demographics were showing me that 75%+ of clickers were female and 80%+ were using mobile phones. Very easy to switch different countries on and off and so focus more on dedicated areas (if appropriate). I only got the one booking (objective achieved) but as a consequence ended up with a list of almost 300 prospects whom I can now potentially 'spam' for next year ;o)

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Happiness is a journey not a destination,
So work like you don’t need the money,
Love like you’ve never been hurt,
and Dance like no one’s watching…
Kirigiwi
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Joined: Tue Jun 02, 2015 11:13 am
Location: Italy
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Post by Kirigiwi »

Thanks for replies everyone.
I'm fairly unwilling to start again with a new FB page in another language so good to hear of other people using 2 languages on 1 page.

Gordo I have had a similar experience with Homeaway, I registered with Homeaway.co.uk plus European upgrade. So far all enquiries and bookings have been from Dutch, Scandinavians, French, Italians - no British at all! I live in hope though that one day the Brits might move away from their Tuscany / Umbria obsession and come and discover some other beautiful parts of Italy!
Gordo
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Post by Gordo »

Kirigiwi wrote:I registered with Homeaway.co.uk plus European upgrade.
I didn't register for any upgrade so assumed it must be part and parcel of the pay per booking policy?

It's not cheap (between 11-13% of rental amounts this year) but I can't grumble at the results. By comparison HL costs only about 4% but I only got a couple through them (they haven't yet twigged that customers don't like getting fleeced).

I'd be interested to know how your HA costs compared to my 13% of the take? (if that's not a rude question).

.
Happiness is a journey not a destination,
So work like you don’t need the money,
Love like you’ve never been hurt,
and Dance like no one’s watching…
Kirigiwi
Posts: 52
Joined: Tue Jun 02, 2015 11:13 am
Location: Italy
Contact:

Post by Kirigiwi »

I'm very happy to compare notes!
I just checked and actually the Euro bundle was included in my subscription, which is the cheapest, classic, version.
I think it's early days for me to tell as my subscription began in May. I didn't have much availability over the summer (most of July and August we'd rented through other venues or were there ourselves) and I think got only 1 enquiry. Since then we've had a couple of bookings, so we have at least made back what we spent. It remains to be seen what happens next spring, I suspect it might work out more or less as it would have been with a PPB.

I might go for PPB next year
brightmike
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Post by brightmike »

Facebook offers a translate option for posts. I have a few friends who post in different languages but I must admit most of the time I have no clue what they are talking about when I read the translation!
Our property website can be found by looking at our profile.
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