Social media mentions come in every shape form and size as well as language. We are constantly evaluating and adding new languages based on our client needs, but what are the best ways to monitor different languages with our platform? Today let’s take a look at that topic.

What languages does Radian6 cover?
English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Danish, Finnish, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese

What do you mean by cover?
When we say we cover a language it means that we recognize this language when our platform goes out looking for posts in social media. This means if someone mentions one of your keywords in the above mentioned languages we will pull in that post.

What’s the best way to setup up my keywords?
If you are looking for mentions in a language other than English, make sure to put those words exactly in to your topic profile as they appear in that language. So if I’m looking for posts that contain the word “Cat” but would also like results in French than I would want to enter the word “Chat” as well. If the language you would like to see results in has masculine & feminine versions of your search terms be sure to consider using both. If you have a brand name that is same in all languages than you do not have to worry about translating it.

What’s the best way to analyze language results in the dashboard?
You may trend or segment by language on any topic trend or topic analysis widget in the dashboard. Here are a few ways to leverage looking at the language breakdown.

Total Brand Language Breakdown

If you are monitoring your brand mentions, looking at the different languages your brand name is being mentioned in is a great way to evaluate whether or not you are aware of all the markets available to you and also a way of seeing if there’s any area that you are unaware of.

For another level of detail you could limit this breakdown to a specific media type. By only selecting to look at the language breakdown in perhaps Blogs or Micromedia instead of all media types, it could help you to target engagement or identify needed resources like someone who can tweet in German.

Competitor Languages

If you watch for your competitor mentions, why not have a look at what language base they are pulling in. This is great information that you can compare to your own to see if there’s a language your competitors are resonating in more than you.

We’ve used a Topic Analysis Bar graph in this case and re-colored English mentions to red. Looking at this we can see the Brand in this case has more English mentions then the two competitors. We could also hide English mentions and use the same process to analyze other languages.

Language Trend

Just like watching spikes in your overall mentions is a way to look for important events, watching your overall mentions trend by language can help you to identify emerging language trends.

We’ve kept the standard colors here, but if you wanted to make a particular language stand out more you could re-color your lines.

Have you checked out your other than English language mentions? Do you generally work in another language other than English? How do you use the dashboard to accomplish your analysis? Let us know your thoughts!