Localizing Your Social Media Marketing Strategy…Is There Such a Thing?

When marketers talk about social media marketing, they always mention Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube as their main marketing campaigns channels. There is no doubt that these social networks are the leading TOM brands, have become an inseparable part of our lives. However, when we plan our social media marketing strategy, we should keep in our mind that there is no single formula for success. It looks like it’s obvious to marketers that they should analyze and plan any campaign taking into consideration various issues like product type, audience, culture, geography and more. I say, when it comes to social media marketing, it’s not different!

Defining the right social networks that are mostly relevant to promote your product or service, become a critical factor these days with all the communities out there. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube may not be the only correct formula for every social marketing campaign. In the European market, for example, there are a few more hyper popular social networks that engage millions of people focused on specific markets.

The most known and used social network in CEE is VKontakte. According to Alexa.com, VKontakte is the most popular social network in Belarus, the second most visited in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, and the 24th most known in the world. It is also ranked in Alexa’s global Top 500 websites. In January 2014 RG.ru made a statement that VKontakte has reached daily audience of around 60 million people and in general has over 228 million users. In the same month analysts of Adobe Social demonstrated in their research that VKontakte was the 8th in the list of social networks with the biggest number of users, while Instagram took the 10th place. The official information coming from VKontakte states that around 66% of their users live in Russia and over 50% of users are 25 years and older.

VKontakte is pretty similar to Facebook in its functionality and nature of usage. Individuals share photos, video, audio and text with their friend. The platform offers few additional features to its audience such as custom audio playlists creation; ability to share videos of unlimited length (such as conference records, webinars, tutorials, etc.) and super detailed inner search capabilities. VKontakte has 3 official languages – English, Russian, and Ukrainian, but there are other unofficial translations done by the users (including German, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic etc.).

TheRunet publication reports that in 2012 European business owners spent $21 billion on internet advertisement, 20% of which was marketing activity in social networks. VKontakte business model relays on paid campaigns in a similar model as Facebook. In 2011 the revenue of VKontakte was $93.8 million; in 2012 this number increased in 27.2% to $119.3 million; although no official number was given in 2013, analysts predict that the revenue would reach $172 million (www.dp.ru).

Many local businesses in CEE discovered the power of VKontakte and most of them create virtual presence in the network to increase their brand exposure. Companies generate dedicated pages and invest in creating communities of fans around them so they could keep continued contact with their audience. Also, due to the targeted nature of VKontakte advertisement systems, it is easy for businesses to publish Ads to targeted audience based on parameters like: geography, demographic, hobbies, interests, education, birth dates, travel, gadgets used, etc. The pricing model is mainly PPC and could vary from few cents to hundreds depending on the location, audience and competition. As budgets are configurable; it allows businesses from all sizes to invest in paid campaigns.

To sum up, if you are planning to expand your business and wish to engage new audience, going solely for the obvious social platforms might not be the best choice for your go-to-market plan. In the same way that companies adjust their products to fit certain markets, social media marketers should adopt localize social marketing approach as well.