Recently, we have spotted a new trend for big brands in the Arab region. They started rolling out Arabia pages, convinced that one page is enough to cover all the countries in the Arab world, and actually overlook the cultural and demographic not to mention the geographic differences between countries in “Arabia”.
BMW did it, McDonalds’ committed one, a big household name in Nestle like Nescafe is doing it, and the list is growing bigger.
Being on Facebook is all about engaging people by being LOCAL, talking to them and having a transparent conversation, tap into/act upon the country’s UNIQUE insights, Informing fans about the latest offers, big promotions that are usually related to one country (most of the times KSA or UAE if it’s in GCC!), driving fans to the actual store or to the place where they can get the product/service..etc, while Arabia page sounds good for a marketer from one-stop-shop point of view, it doesn’t help meet social objectives.
The right way for any brand who actually wants to engage the people to go LOCAL! The brand should dedicate a facebook page for each country in the Arab world ; each Arab country is different in many angles, from accent and culture to product promotions in that country.
You want to go social? Abide the social rules and be local!
i.e.: McDonalds UAE, BMW Saudi, Nescafe Jordan!!!
I believe that a “Brand Arabia” page is not any different from the “broadcasting” approach of traditional marketing; it’s like airing a commercial for a brand on MBC 1 channel to promote an offer for one country in the gulf! While the actual reach is for all the Arab countries; waste of money.
We all have the dream of having one Arabia united on the map, and eventually have one Facebook page for brands, but the case is different here. It’s marketing and brands trying to connect to people.
Have a quick look at how Starbucks, one of the best 5 brands on Facebook sets a great example for local facebook pages. They have separate pages for different cities in America itself!
I’ll mention a couple of reasons on why it’s a huge mistake for brands to go “Brand Arabia” in the Arab world:
- Engagement: according to Social Bakers, local pages have more engagement than global pages by THREE TIMES.
- The different time zones between countries will affect the exposure of the posts in the newsfeed, it extends some times to 3 hours difference.
- Arabia pages will eventually have to post generic news! And fans won’t be interested in as much as they would be in news that is related to their own country!
- The brand loses the personalization of some specific attributes for the brand in a country! Thus waste great opportunity for awesome content.
- The brand offers or contests eventually will have to be directed at a specific country, thus ignoring the rest of the countries.
- The brand lose many online to offline drivers (come to X in JBR and get your free cheese burger) as other fans in other countries will feel left out.
After Oreo posted this targeted post, many fans had commented on why is it not in their country or city, and the engegement on this exact post compared to other generic ones was really small.
So here we realize the importance role of local pages. Personalized interaction, local engagement and targeted reach.
Add the local awesomeness, have fun and engage your fans!
Would love to hear what you think.
Amer is the founder of Hashtag, a new social media agency that specializes in humanizing brands on the web in the Middle East.
website: www.hashtag-me.com
Thanks for the question, i believe that it applies on Twitter too. However, on a less importance basis than Facebook as the whole marketing on Twitter could be different than FB.
The only 2 ways to target countries on Twitter is through Hashtags (e.g #Saudi) or a promoted tweet.
eventually, it’s always better to have a Facebook page and a Twitter account under the same local name for maximum utilization of these tools.
That only applies to Facebook, right? No way to geotarget your tweets so they only go to followers from a specific country or location.
Thank you Adel. great addition to the reasons, I agree completely with what you said. its upon marketers to amend this practice and push forward the Arabic, engaging content forward.
You are absolutely right Amer! I will go as far as calling this practice "Titanic Marketing" in the sense that it completely violates the basic rules to segmentation and target market selection. It is not hard to see why this has been carelessly implemented by valuable brands in the region; IT IS COST EFFECTIVE! And that does NOT make it OK.
But to get serious for a moment, one of the main issues the MENA region is facing on the web is the availability of quality content creators ("QCC's")…The influence of the English culture in the MENA region is very strong for obvious reasons apparent to everyone. The key to overcoming this hurdle is the development of QCC's in the MENA region. Just because it is a localized page doesn't mean that it can be in English…localization is all about connections. Does a brand connect with its customers on a personal level? That is what social media is all about…If not…then they need to re-evaluate their approach and develop content that is relevant, local, and most importantly targeted.
Thanks Taleb, good point. But still we prefer localized pages I'll tell you why from personal experience, we're running a competition campaign for the MENA right now for a client on their facebook page, and although the competition is open to all countries in the MENA, people from different countries communicate with us in different dialects and there's some serious confusion going on but we're managing it so far. To give you an example, Egyptians use and write different words in Arabic than people in Jordan or Lebanon would use. In fact in some cases we had to respond to users in English which is not ideal and confuses the users in my opinion. Now unless you have a team that can handle the different communications from different countries than I think it might be do-able, but again it has to be well planned and well managed.
What you see on a brand arabia facebook page is not what the admin of the page sees. If you reside in UAE and a post is targeted to KSA, you won't see the post or the engagement happening. All the best in managing an Arabia facebook brand one day. You will touch on what I say.
Hi J.VonStauffenberg, thanks for the comment, its not uncommon for brands in the region to do that but there has to be a proper strategy and strong management behind it. a while back we covered a story about how VW launched one of their new models on Facebook https://interactiveme.com/index.php/2011/05/be-sur… from what I remember they used one page for the campaign and there was some sort of photo competition going on where people only from 2 cities could win the prize.
Now my problem with that approach is that it creates confusion, why should someone in Egypt for example see a promotion for customers in the UAE, then the confusion turns into frustration if one country gets better promos than another and you end up alienating your fan base.
Again if its well planed and executed it could be good, because at the end of the day managing more than one page can be a headache for a brand from a marketers point of view. however, planning more than 5 countries content from one page could be more hectic.
What about target specific posts? I am positive that most of the "Arabia" pages, post country specific news to keep the local community engaged on local promotions.
What do you say about that?