One of the challenges of running a Facebook page is creating pages for users who speak different languages.
Archival article. It may contain references to outdated information.
What can be done?
If the page’s users speak several languages, we can write posts in different languages and set them to be displayed only to users who speak a given language and/or live in a given country.
To do this, when writing a post, press the padlock button “Public” and choose the “Customize” option. This will let us define in which geographic area the post should be visible and what languages the users who see it may speak.
What for?
Imagine we run the page of the world-famous Disco Polo band Hot Boys. It makes absolutely no sense to show our users in China that Disco Polo Hot Boys have a concert in Paris. We can, however, create a post in Russian that can be seen by residents of western Russia, Ukraine and Moldova who speak Russian and Ukrainian.
Limitations
Unfortunately, this feature only works for our own posts. We cannot in any way control the visibility of photos and other materials, nor – perhaps most importantly – can we prevent our fans’ posts in different languages from mixing together.
What to do?
How to live :-)? One solution is to run separate profiles for users from different countries, in different languages. This is often done, but it seems to be a temporary solution, completely out of step with the era of globalisation.
There used to be a saying: “a person who speaks two languages? – bilingual; a person who knows only one language? – an American”. From the perspective of Americans, who speak almost exclusively English, this problem may go unnoticed. In multilingual Europe, where several languages are spoken in many countries, it looks completely different. We hope Facebook will look into this issue.
It must also be admitted that the solution is not at all obvious. While letting page administrators choose which users see which content is a solution that suggests itself, the question of how to adjust the visibility of users’ posts is more complex. We await Facebook’s ideas.
