So how can brand managers take advantage of these new capabilities? Wildfire’s Page Manager offers brands the ability to create a seamless end-to-end Facebook experience, regardless of whether users view Facebook content on their desktops or their mobile devices.

Facebook’s Mobile Platform

Prior to the December 2011 release, the only way to deliver app content to mobile users was to host it on a mobile website outside the Facebook ecosystem. By using this approach, a brand could link to an app from its fan page, and a mobile user who clicked the link was redirected to a website in his mobile browser, outside Facebook. This was less than ideal for a few reasons. First, numerous studies have shown that Facebook users are inherently distrustful of processes that route them outside of Facebook (doing so can result in high bounce rates, among other things). Second, removing users from the Facebook ecosystem prevents the app from tapping into the viral nature of Facebook’s platform, such as the ability to share app content with friends.

There’s been lots of mention in the press about Facebook’s exploding popularity outside the U.S. – currently there are over 500 million international Facebook users! But we haven’t seen any coverage about how this growth impacts the way multi-national brands think about social media marketing –until now. Based on the data we pulled from over 100,000+ promotions run on our platform, it’s clear that international users are not just using Facebook to interact with friends; they’re also on Facebook to engage with brands. This represents an enormous opportunity for global and regional brands to create targeted and relatively inexpensive viral marketing campaigns for fans throughout the world. In this post we’ll discuss the demographic trends you should be aware of, we’ll highlight some best practices for international social media marketing and we’ll showcase a very cool global campaign from Qatar Airways.

According to Inside Facebook, the U.S. represents 22% of global Facebook users, but international growth dwarfs that of the U.S. Specifically, markets in Asia, South America and Europe are experiencing high double-digit and even triple-digit increases in Facebook users. This growth is seen across the board, from developed European countries such as Germany and Spain, to developing countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas.

Top 20 Facebook Markets by Country  
(as of June 01, 2011, Source: InsideFacebook)

Social promotions aren’t just for U.S. Consumers

Wildfire’s promotion entry data shows similar strong trends in international growth. Facebook users in Europe, Asia and Africa (particularly the Middle East) have entered Wildfire’s customers’ promotions in droves as brands launched marketing campaigns specifically targeted to them.

Wildfire’s Year over Year Promotion Entry Growth by Continent

While the rest of the world is still lagging the U.S. in terms of social media sophistication and adoption of social marketing tools, Wildfire believes international brands are quickly catching up as they see the return on their Facebook marketing dollars.

Qatar Airways: A multi-country social media innovator

Recently, Wildfire worked with Qatar Airways media agency, the Internet Success Hub, to create a global Facebook campaign that simultaneously ran in Arabic, English, French, Spanish and German. Fans were automatically routed to the appropriate entry page based on their language preference.

The results were extremely impressive, with Qatar Airways gaining 150,000 Facebook fans in 30 days! For a relatively small investment, Qatar Airways was able to achieve global reach in an extremely short timeframe. Although it may seem daunting to try to simultaneously reach a global audience, brands and agencies can take advantage of Facebook’s strong international growth by using tools such as Wildfire’s Social Marketing Suite. These marketing tools allow companies to:

• Create one custom, attractive landing page whose content can be easily translated, modified and targeted to users based on the user’s country and language
• Send messages to multiple pages that are targeted by a user’s geographic location and language preference
• Run promotions simultaneously in multiple languages – and automatically ensure users see the campaign in their language
• Easily translate promotions into the most common foreign languages

Now we want to hear from you! Are you thinking about or have you already implemented an international social media marketing strategy? Tell us below.