It’s Twitter Tip Tuesday — every Tuesday we’ll focus on one Twitter Tip and show you how to integrate it into your social media strategy. This week we’ll show you how (and why) to use Sprout Social’s translation feature to easily translate tweets from a variety of foreign languages.

Did you know that of the 200 million or so daily tweets on Twitter, only about 39 percent of those are in English? In fact, Arabic is one of the fastest growing languages on the social network!

If your company or its products and services cater to an international audience, chances are pretty good that your foreign customers are tweeting about you in their native languages. Here’s how to use Sprout Social’s powerful translation tool to make sure you don’t miss any mention, mencionar, or mención of your brand on Twitter!

Set Your Default Language

The translation tool is an automatic feature of the current version of Sprout Social. To configure it properly, you’ll first need to set the default language that you’d like the tool to translate into. For most of our readers, this will be English. But if you’d like to choose a different default language, you can select from a list of 53 different languages.

To set the default language for the translation tool, in the top right hand corner of Sprout Social, click the gear icon, then click “General Settings.” Scroll down to the field entitled “Translation Language.” Click the triangle icon and select your default language. Finally, scroll to the bottom of the General Settings page and click the green “Done” button to save your changes.

How to Use The Translate Tool

When you’re monitoring your Twitter feeds and you come across tweets that mention your brand — albeit in a foreign language — deciphering these tweets with the built-in translation tool is very easy.

In the Sprout Social application, when you hover over any tweet in your feed, you’ll see a gear icon on the top right corner of the tweet. If the tweet happens to be in a foreign language, simply click the gear icon and then click the “Translate Message” option. Your tweet will automatically be translated into the default language you selected in the first step of this procedure. The dark blue button on the left side of the tweet (with an abbreviation of your default language) is actually a toggle switch. It allows you to alternate between the original tweet and the version translated by the translation tool.

You can use the tool to translate any incoming tweet — not just those mentioning your brand. If you have a foreign competitor, this can be a very effective way to keep track of what’s being said about it on Twitter, no matter where in the world the tweet originated. You can also use the translation tool to join conversations already in progress, even if they’re not in your native language.

Ever used a translation tool to converse in a different language? Share your experiences in the comments below.

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