Language Barriers Still Stymie International Social Network Adoption and Community Building

A recently released ComScore report indicates that the most popular social networks in Europe are those that allow users to interact in their local languages. This may explain why Facebook is having such a hard time penetrating Germany. From the report:

Interestingly, Facebook, which has been growing rapidly across Europe, has not yet made a major introduction to the German market. The site experienced 422% growth in Europe and attracted 7.6 million U.K. visitors in July compared to 177,000 German visitors in the same period – a reach of 1.2 percent of the entire German social networking community.

Bob Ivins, EVP of International Markets at comScore, attributes the relative success of these sites to their ability to cater for local markets: “These sites are founded on their ability to allow Internet users to communicate quickly and effectively with one another. As MySpace.com’s European success shows, language is an important factor. Being able to develop local language pages has allowed them to attract traffic from a number of European countries.”

Our Speaker Nick O’Neill observes that the data about use of Facebook in Europe — which grew 422% in July — may be skewed by the overwhelming British use of Facebook. London is now the biggest network on Facebook and the UK is third overall in users behind Canada and the United States.

Given the importance of local language, this comes as no surprise. Facebook is a brilliant platform and the international audience is growing. But as long as the UI remains English-only, world domination is going to be impossible.

Online community building efforts can be similarly hamstrung by language and culture barriers. When international organizations invest time and money in building community on Facebook, they’re investing mostly in their English-speaking audience. Meanwhile, community managers using local language social networks in other nations are engaging with their own community islands. The groups may be linked by common interests and needs, but they are relatively unaware of the other.

These communities would be twice as powerful and interesting if there were a way for them to interact despite the language barriers. Social networks obviously see the benefit of going multi-lingual. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook rolls out at least one new language in the next year.

I wonder if we’ll see a corresponding growth in demand for bi- or even tri-lingual/cultural community managers that can facilitate international community interaction across language and culture barriers.

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