Global social media marketing: 8 strategies for selling worldwide

Global social media marketing strategies and new tools are empowering more brands than ever before to reach a worldwide audience. Creating an Instagram account or working with an influencer now gives businesses access to millions of people right away.

Going global effectively requires investing in a carefully crafted social media marketing strategy. This ensures you’re able to refine your audiences, optimize your content and achieve more reliable results across multiple regions.

In this article, we’ve outlined the eight steps for success in your global social media marketing journey. From defining objectives and designing personas to budgeting and tools, these strategies grant you and your brand a ticket to increase your share of voice across the world.

What is a global social media marketing strategy?

A global social media marketing strategy is similar to a regular social media strategy, but focuses on a marketing approach that goes beyond your domestic market.

Your current social media marketing strategy can act as a blueprint to capture the market in other countries.

Benefits of global social media marketing

In today’s digital-focused landscape, the importance of effective social media marketing can’t be overstated. A smart social marketing framework can give your brand’s reputation a boost, give you access to actionable data and expand your reach.

But what about a global strategy? For starters, a one-size-fits-all approach to your social accounts won’t work for global audiences and markets. It won’t even work domestically, as your content should be tailored to each audience and network.

People in different countries have different expectations of brands. You’ll likely have new competitors to consider, and other cultural backgrounds that impact how consumers perceive content. There are also language barriers and financial buying power to consider, among other differences.

For example, KFC’s Kazakhstan account uses the country’s local language and influencers, while promoting country-specific promotions and products. It combines these regional differences with KFC’s recognizable global brand, through its color schemes, font and other design choices.

A global social media marketing strategy enables you to clearly define your new audience. You can then conceptualize exactly how to communicate with that audience within your branding to achieve your desired results.

Set yourself up for success by getting the right documentation in place and creating ways to align your team. This will enable you to widen your reach while keeping your strategy close to home.

8 tips to ace global social media marketing

Define your global strategy by following these eight stages. They’ll take you through planning and execution, and how to refine your approach in the future.

1. Define your social media objectives

Having a social media strategy without goals is like driving without a destination. You’ve got momentum, but you won’t know if you’re going in the right direction.

Determine exactly what you want to achieve with each of your social media accounts and for each of your regional audiences. Some common social media goals include:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Generating more sales or leads
• Boosting your community engagement or PR
• Growing your audience through increasing follower counts
• Building traffic to your website

If you’re already engaged on social media, conduct a global social audit. An audit helps you to review how each of your accounts is performing right now. This should uncover insights into your ideal future objectives.

This video gives more details on how to conduct a social media audit.

2. Understand your global market

After defining your goals, you need to grasp the uniqueness of your global market. A fundamental part of international marketing is understanding how to market your brand to people from different cultures and regions.

Certain platforms are more popular in different countries; Southeast Asia has several good examples of this. In 2024, Facebook is the most popular social media platform in most countries. YouTube is also popular in Indonesia, while X (formerly known as Twitter) is the most popular in Thailand and Laos.

The first stage of your strategy should involve choosing the right platform for your chosen audience. Here are a few things to consider when you’re doing so:

• Platform popularity and availability: Facebook is the most popular platform worldwide in terms of monthly active users. But in China, where Meta is banned, Weibo or WeChat are popular platforms to use instead. And while LinkedIn is the world’s largest networking site, to reach the German job-seekers market, Xing is the more popular networking site.
• Target demographic: While there’s always some crossover, different age groups are more likely to use certain platforms over others. If your audience is younger, TikTok and Instagram may be your focus. If they skew older, Facebook will be key.
• Your team resources: Certain platforms, like TikTok, require specific skills in video editing, visual storytelling and more. You may want to consider growing your social media department if you need to expand your team’s specialties.
• Your goals: These might open opportunities for you to use different kinds of apps. For example, if you want to expand your customer service capabilities, use WhatsApp to help consumers around the world.
• Rising social media platforms: What platforms are on the rise in different markets? When you look at social media in Europe, for example, you can see that 41% of European customers plan on using WhatsApp.

You can also leverage your current social media following to find regional insights. This is possible through social listening.

By using social listening tools, you can find out how your current social media account’s audience feels about certain content. Use a sentiment tracker to find out how positively or negatively your audience feels, then apply this to their region to uncover data that helps your global strategy.

With a Social Listening tool like Sprout, you can become an audience expert, identifying conversation trends and discovering influential topics. All of this data can be used to better understand your new target market and what they expect from your social media output.

3. Establish a global social media marketing team

There are many ways to build a social media team. Depending on the structure of your company, you’ll need to determine if this team will operate your social accounts independently, or with corporate oversight. You’ll also need to determine whether the team leads of each country or product have input on your overall global strategy.

Your social team might also be tasked with interacting with your audience through comments, direct messages or other forms of outreach. If this is the case, you need to tweak your approach to cater to each regional audience.

Using a tool like Sprout’s Customer Care solution can help your team personalize responses quickly, achieving more effective communication that crosses regional barriers.

4. Build audience personas for better targeting

Once you’ve understood your audience and assembled your team, you need to create audience personas for your new market.

Work with influencers and marketing team members with lived experience in your chosen region of expansion if possible. This will help you avoid cultural appropriation, and create tailored campaigns that resonate with certain markets.

Cultural moments also naturally occur across social networks. TikTok sounds often trend across regions, and talking points arise on X based on breaking news updates. Create a strategy to respond to cultural moments at the right time, and when they most resonate with your chosen audience. One example below shows Nando’s Pakistan account promoting the recent gold medal victory of a Pakistani athlete.

You can create audience personas using your current social media data. Use social media marketing tools to evaluate your existing audience, and then determine how you should tweak this data based on social differences in your new region.

You can also use social listening technology to refine this data based on comments and post engagements. If you want to go one step further, harness competitive intelligence to obtain these insights from your competition.

All of this data can help you uncover pain points and common attributes, which you can use to create several defined personas.

Once you’ve created these personas, apply the information to your brand voice. Think about how you can modify your messaging to better engage these specific regional personas.

5. Take advantage of influencer partnerships

Influencer marketing strategies should also fit into your wider global strategy. Working with influencers with engaged regional audiences can help you increase your reach in a particular market, and connect directly with your target personas.

For example, US brand Frank’s RedHot Sauce partnered with the UK celebrity influencer Danny Dyer through their regional UK account. This helped them work with a recognizable influencer in the country, furthering their brand’s UK reputation and sales.

It’s important to use an influencer marketing tool to find the right influencer for your campaigns. Tools like Sprout give you access to extensive filters, which can help you narrow down an influencer based on how popular they are in certain countries. You’re also able to manage and track the results of your global influencer campaigns easily.

6. Budget for your global social media strategy

Expanding your social media campaigns globally will involve some budget considerations. Segment your overall marketing budget to create localized budgets for each region. This will help you to keep control over the costs of each region and account.

If you’re working with influencers, consider the costs of working with people from different regions, as they will have different value considerations for their work. It’s also worth getting to grips with typical influencer pricing before you negotiate.

Make sure to apply localized costs to each of your budgets, including ad spend, cost of content creation and cost of content management. All of these will differ depending on how much you’re handling in-house and how much you’re outsourcing.

Look at how you can optimize your localized budgets once you’ve tallied up these costs, based on previous results, customer feedback or team needs.

Finally, always plan for a contingency fund. Save this fund ‌for any unexpected costs, such as emergency crisis management, currency fluctuations or ad testing.

7. Use a social media management tool to implement tactics wisely

Choosing the right social media platforms can only get you so far. You also need to be strategic and creative with your content to reach your audiences, and leverage tools to your advantage.

Social media management tools can help you tap into current trends, automate and schedule local content, suggest sentiment improvements through AI and more. Adopt these tools to:

Boost video content (particularly short-form)

Short-form video has skyrocketed in popularity, particularly across social media.

Using the type of content that consumers want to engage with can expand your reach and boost your engagement. Tap into this format, especially on networks that make it their priority, like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. Below, PlayStation Italia partnered with an influencer to create an Instagram Reel that appeals to their target audience.

Use social listening to keep tabs on customer behavior

Social listening can give you key insights that help at every stage of the global social marketing process.

Optimize your listening using social listening AI tools, which streamline gathering and measuring your listening insights.

Fine-tune your brand voice and messaging

Create a dedicated brand voice cadence for each of your chosen target markets. Remember that you may need to modify your English to accommodate non-native speakers.

For your brand values and taglines, translate them into the native language and consult a local expert to see if any of them need changing. Sometimes, just a small tweak in wording will make all the difference.

Below, Netflix Latin America shares a popular meme for its SpongeBob audience in Spanish.

Schedule in local time zones and message locally

Your most active audience might be in the US but if you’re building up an audience in Germany, you’ll need to target them at the right times. If you’re operating with a single account, add local times and messaging to your post schedule.

Do yourself a favor and schedule your content ahead of time to ensure you’re reaching certain markets at the right time for them, without having to set an alarm for yourself to post at odd hours.

Keep up with local news, trends and holidays

Any local breaking news has the chance to become global. If your team is tracking it as it breaks, you have more time to get ahead of it or even pause the posting schedule.

Holidays are also a major consideration for international brands. For example, Father’s Day is not the same day globally. Plan ahead by noting any market-specific holidays or dates to prioritize in your content calendar. Below is an example from Apple’s Shot on iPhone campaign around the Chinese New Year.

8. Measure your performance to refine your strategy

Finally, refine your global social media strategy over time by always measuring your performance.

Look at how each of your accounts is doing against the goals you set out initially, and then consider how you can improve. This process is far easier if you use a social media analytics tool. For example, you can automatically analyze how posts on different channels do to understand what people like and why. You can also track how your competitors on social media operate, to benchmark your performance, get a report on each network‌ and more.

Collect an extensive analysis of your social media presence across each of your different regional accounts and make data-driven changes to refine your global strategy.

Start marketing to a worldwide audience of different generations

Marketing your brand globally is an exciting proposition, and with the above eight stages in mind, you can expand effectively.

One aspect of marketing that all cultures have in common is they’re all made up of several different generations, each with unique expectations.

An important expansion area to consider across social media is marketing to these different generations through a generational strategy. Read more about the considerations you should make for successful generational marketing across social platforms today.