British businesses are lagging behind on social media, research shows, at a time when social presence is becoming increasingly important.

The recent Auros ‘Are you serious about social?’ study found that only a quarter of British retailers with Twitter accounts used the medium to respond to customer enquiries, while website globalisation consultant John Yunker found that there was only one British firm – PricewaterhouseCoopers – in the top ten global corporate tweeters in his report Twittering in Tongues.

Furthermore, Econsultancy’s 2010 Social Media and Online PR report found that 83% of marketers indicated they will increase their social media spend in 2011, and yet only 26% said they will run campaigns in more than one country and language.

Having a presence on social media is becoming increasingly essential for any business that relies upon its ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) to drive business. Google has indicated that it is now factoring signals from social networks, such as links, into its algorithm for SERP and real-time search rankings.

Excitingly, for businesses operating in several language markets, there are massive opportunities to be had in running social media campaigns, particularly for Twitter, in every target language.

“With Twitter remaining the most popular social media platform for corporations, running a foreign language Twitter campaign can be a massively profitable exercise,” said Lingo24’s founder Christian Arno.

“Yet compared to the likes of Sony, Microsoft, MTV and Air France, British companies have been ponderously slow to tweet in foreign tongues.

“There’s a notion that British companies just can’t support Twitter in more than one language,” said Christian Arno. “But the reality is that if a company has operations beyond the Channel, they need to run multiple Twitter accounts to have international impact. With more than 200 million users around the world, Twitter is where their customers are.”

Lingo24 will be launching multilingual Twitter feeds for Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands in the very near future – stay tuned to the Lingo24 blog for more information.

In the meantime, you can follow us @Lingo24, or follow Lingo24’s Directors Christian Arno (@l24ca) and Jack Waley-Cohen (@lingo24jwc) for up-to-the-second news on language, localisation, translation, digital marketing and Lingo24.

tags: eCommerce, Foreign Language Internet, multilingual twitter, social media, Twitter