 Today I'm going to be talking about a very Montreal-flavored topic, which is bilingual social media management, and I'm going to be going through how to build a bilingual online presence from the ground up. So the first thing to note is there are a lot of challenges with four bilingual marketers online. With websites specifically, when you have a bilingual website, you can easily toggle between languages so the user can filter the content to see only the language that they want to see. The same isn't true for social media, so when a user arrives on a Facebook page, they're not able to say, I only want to see the things that I can understand. So the first major challenge is irritating someone by offering them content in a language that they don't understand. There's also lots of challenges with content production, because you're duplicating that content and your workflow gets more complicated, your budget gets bigger, and there are issues of brand identity. So how do you maintain a coherent brand identity that's specific to you while also remaining adaptable to these different niches? So in light of all of those challenges and many more, why would you be bilingual at all? And this question can be answered in two very separate ways. The first is a pretty philosophical answer. There's a quote by Nelson Mandela that I really love. If you talk to a man in a language that he understands, that goes to his head. But if you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. And as communicators and marketers, what we really want to do is reach people and not only reach people so they get a message, but so they process it, they understand it, they act on it. The second answer to the question, why be bilingual, is really going to help you define the particular flavor of your bilingual strategy. So based on your industry, it could be very different. So government entities have to be bilingual for legal, political reasons. That's very different than, for example, McDonald's, which has a regional market in Quebec and is delivering content to that audience specifically. So just an open-ended question for you to think about, why am I bilingual? Okay, let me let that impact my strategy. So the first thing you have to do is choose which platforms you want to be on. My advice is let your business objectives be the first point that you think about when you do this and let language be a secondary criteria. So if you're a lifestyle brand, be on Instagram. If you're a B2B business, be on LinkedIn. The only caveat to that is adoption of new and emerging platforms in non-anglophone markets in Canada tends to lag behind a little bit. And also certain features are rolled out progressively to different regions or to users in different languages. So you might not always be able to use the same fancy new tricks for every segment. After that, the next thing you'll have to do is set up your profiles. And the biggest question there is, do you want to have one profile for two languages or do you want to have one profile for each language? And that's really a profile, like a platform-specific question. So I'm going to go through some of the major social media platforms and kind of give you a little bit of an answer for that. So on Facebook, Facebook used to have a really handy audience restriction feature where you could post something. So I would post something in French and I would restrict that audience to only users of Facebook and French. And so that would get delivered to the timelines of only those people. And also only those people could see that post when they got to my page. It was a pretty unique feature, but they asked it, which is really sad for us. So now there's two separate kind of camps and schools of thought. One camp has one page and the other has two pages. So whether you decide to do that, which one of those options is better for you, I would say let the size of your prospective audience dictate that. So if you anticipate having a relatively small audience, maybe under 10,000 people, then I would say stick to one page because organic reaches so dismal these days that fragmenting your audience further is not going to do you any favors. However, if you think you're going to have a fairly large audience, having two pages is probably more interesting for you. One thing that I wouldn't recommend doing that a lot of people actually do is double posting. So post one status in French, right underneath, post the other one in English. The reason I wouldn't recommend doing that is because you have no control over who sees which of the two posts. So you could have a Francophone user see both the English and the French or a Francophone user only see the English. So it's just pretty messy. On the left, I've included some institutions, personalities, businesses who do a good job on each platform. And so if you want to do your own research, stock them, steal all their ideas, I have vetted them. And on the right, I have an example of a good piece of content on Facebook that I like. So I like it because it leans very heavily on the visual, which is something that's really helpful when you have two languages. And I also like that the English and the French are very balanced. They're kind of the same length. They're split with these quirky little emojis. So there's kind of a sense of humor behind it. I think this is a good post for Facebook. Instagram is pretty different because it's so visually focused. And so we can get away with a lot more because we're essentially showing instead of telling the story. So the post on the right, it's an example from a local Montreal tea company. I really like the aesthetic of the photo. They have their bilingual messaging underneath. It's a screenshot from a desktop, which is why it looks a little different than what you might be used to seeing. With Instagram stories, it's a little different because you have audio frequently, which can be a problem. But it's still a very documentary sort of medium. And so I think you can get away with just using stickers and gifts and dressing it up and minimizing the number of words that you need to tell the story. Twitter is actually the opposite. So it's very hard to get a lot into a tweet because of the character count and the limitations there. And so most of the institutions and companies choose to have two separate profiles on this platform. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation is the example on the right. I like how they've set up their handles because they're very balanced. So they have CMHC underscore CA and the same but the acronym in French for their French profile. They've translated all of their hashtags. A little word on hashtags, accents on Twitter don't matter. And so CAFE with an accent or without an accent is actually the same indexing term. But that's not true across all platforms. So on Instagram, those are two searchable words. So if you're using a lot of hashtags in your campaigns for discoverability, just keep that in mind. LinkedIn is kind of particular. So what you decide to do on it, I think, depends on your business, whether you want to have a bilingual presence or whether you just want to have one language on it. Almost everyone has only one profile. So if you are a B2B business and you're really generating leads and doing sales activity on LinkedIn, then by all means, be bilingual. But if on the other hand, all you're using it for is recruiting talent or showcasing your corporate culture, then I would say use your LinkedIn to reflect what your company is actually like. And I really like the example from Cosette. Cosette is a marketing agency here in Montreal. And they're very good at being flexible with their bilingual presence. So they run some campaigns in English and some campaigns in French. And so they'll post selectively about each or they'll have these double language posts. And this one in particular is a little short video. It's kind of layering almost like magazine clippings. But the video is very versatile because there's no words in it other than the name of their agency. And they have the little bilingual messaging above and below. So bilingual websites are really their own talk in and of themselves. But there's two plugins that I would recommend that are widely used, WPML and Polylang. There's a talk today at three, I believe, on WPML. So if you want to know more about that, I would recommend going to see that talk. Both of these are widely used. They integrate pretty well with the WordPress backend is actually their interface. They integrate with SEO plugins. You can choose from different URL structures, which is also important for SEO. Domain names also are accent sensitive. So Montreal with or without an accent is actually two separate domains. So best practice there is really to purchase both and redirect from one to the other. And also remember with your social media information on the bottom of the pages to customize it. So if you have two Twitter accounts, make sure the Twitter icon, if the user is navigating in direct to the French Twitter account. So after that, you're ready to start putting out content. And I've talked a little bit about specific examples on each platform, but more generally speaking, there's two questions that you have to keep in mind. One is, can you repurpose the same content to both audiences or do you really need unique content for each? And that is very specific to what kind of business you have, a consumer brand can easily just take one product and put it out in English and French versus a TV broadcaster with programming in two languages is not gonna be able to use the same content to both audiences. And at what frequency are you gonna be posting in each language? So is it really 50-50? And can you be honest with yourself about whether it can be 50-50? Cause I see a lot of people start off with the best intentions and then one segment really gets neglected. So just be strategic from the very beginning about whether you're aiming for 50-50 or 80-20, whatever. And the most basic rule of thumb for content is just be a ruthless minimalist when it comes to words and make sure that you're showing more than you are telling because that's gonna help you and a bilingual logo goes a long way towards not having to make the same piece of content twice. So that's it, thank you very much. If you have any questions, I'm around or on LinkedIn or any other social media, I'm pretty much Dana Dragomir. Thank you.