Last week Manchester City officially launched 10 new language-specific Twitter accounts, enabling them to connect with fans in 160 countries.
Fans who speak Traditional Chinese, French, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai will now be able to read tweets from the club. These new languages follow previous Twitter accounts in English and Arabic.
Has this investment in translation been successful? The numbers speak for themselves: the new accounts have already gained the club over 25,000 new fans.
Diego Gigliani, Director of Marketing, Media and Fan Development, said: “As the club continues to attract fans from across the world and our global community grows, it’s important to find new ways to connect and engage with them in order to build deeper relationships.”
“Its incredible to think that fans from countries as far away from Manchester as Argentina, Indonesia, Russia or Korea will now receive tweets with Club news, videos, competitions, match-updates in real time, in their own language and typically in the palm of their hands.”
Any marketers looking to expand their social media presence can look to Manchester City for inspiration. Earlier this year, the club launched the broadest multilingual website offering in football by translating and localising their website into 13 languages. Communicating with fans in their own language engages a wider fan base and makes fans feel closer to their chosen team. Through their marketing initiatives, Manchester City is poised to build one of the strongest fan communities in the Premier League. With multilingual marketing, the club’s ambition to become one of the biggest football clubs in the world may just happen.
Today Translations is a London-based translation company that specialises in providing language and business services in over 200 languages, from football to finance.
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