And so you start posting pictures, videos, entertaining material, exclusive information, controversial statements to start a debate, and so on. Your amount of likes rises as should your “talking about” rate. Everything looks fine, yet some questions might dawn on you.

First of all you should know what that “talking about” means. According to Facebook, it is the sum of “users you have created a story from your post” – a story being a like, a share, a comment or an answer to an event. Now that this has been cleared up, a bigger question needs to be answered:

What is a good “talking about” rate?

In other words, at what point can you consider the amount of interaction satisfying? Facebook does not tell you that.

This is why we decided to lead our own inquiry and compare 12 major brands (BMW, Audi, Volkswagen, Facebook, Starbucks, McDonald’s, PlayStation, iTunes, HP, Subway, EA Sports, Nivea) which have the particularity to have several Facebook pages: one for every language or country. We checked their number of likes and “talking about” rates on three dates (24th January, 31st January and 7th February 2012), calculated their ratios and established an average of these.

The ideal “talking about” figure or number of likes?

It seems that even if you have a brilliant online media specialist running your page, having more than 1,000,000 likes renders it challenging to reach high “talking about” rates – between 1% and 3% with the exception of the American page of McDonald’s that exceeds 5%. A previous study had already proven that large pages (over a million likes) have more trouble reaching their “likers”.

On the other side, the highest ratios “talking about” number of likes are reached by pages with less than 100,000 likes, higher even when they have less than 10,000 likes. They manage to score 10 to almost 20% with the exception of the Polish Audi page that scores an astounding 44% with a mere 4,000 likes.

In a nutshell it seems you should not aim for quantity, but for quality. It is better to have fewer faithful committed fans than a large pool of likes that does not interact with you.

So does a high number of likes really imply a lower talking about rate?

We did some correlation analysis to check what the statistics would tell us. There are two possibilities:
1. The number of “talking about” increases at the same rate as the number of likes, or in statistical terms: There is a linear relationship.
2. The number of “talking about” slows down the higher the number of likes gets, or in statistical terms: There is a non-linear relationship.

Calculating both options we get a correlation of 0,96 for option 1 (using the Bravais Pearson correlation coefficient) and 0,87 for option 2 (using Spearman’s Rho). Both coefficients can rank between 0 (no correlation) to 1 (perfect correlation). Hence both options have a high statistical correlation: Based on the numbers we cannot say for sure which assumption is correct. If you think this sucks (we did) just scroll all the way to the end and fill out the survey (this helps us gather more data so we can do a better analysis).

The “talking about” vs. “likes” data in a graph

Is your targeted country a factor?

As we pointed out in our first Facebook study, some countries are more inclined to liking a page than others. What about interaction then?

The final figure is 5.79% (for our sample) – that is the average percentage “talking about” per number of likes, all countries taken together. However, the average differs from one country to another. If your page targets a Polish audience, the average is above 10% – the Poles are more faithful fans than other countries. Brazilian and French audiences are fairly willing to participate as well: both scored over 5%. Spain is right behind with 4.75%. Then come the tough crowds – Germany and Italy only get 3.92% and 3.57% respectively. The American/general page is last with 2.60%. This might have different reasons such as how many brands an average user in that country likes – the more brands, the less time for interaction with each brand.

So, by now you know that “talking about” rates differ by country and possibly by the number of likes. But wouldn’t it be cool to have some comparison data for your industry? We thought so as well, so we created a survey to do a more in-depth analysis including Reach and Virality data from Facebook Insights – finding out what good rates are, what your target should be, etc.

In order to do so, we need YOUR help! We would like to invite you to fill out a 10-question anonymous survey that only takes 5 minutes (we used a stop watch to make sure) to complete.

You can find the online survey by clicking on the URL below:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/facebook-insights

We will list all participating companies with a link below (if they want) in order to boost results. The following companies are participating:
Dublin’s Q102: More music. Less talk.
Bonprix: Fashion, shoes and homeware at unbeatable prices.
Hitmeister: 100% secure buying and selling.
WHU: Otto Beisheim School of Management.
Netmoms: Babies, kids and pregnancy.
OnlineMarketingJobs: The best Jobs for SEO, SEA and online marketing.
Loftville: My key to the best apartments in the city.
Tatort News: The weblog to Germany’s most successful crime show.

In order to get listed, send us an email to Stefanie [at] bab[dot]la

Download the Twitter Business Guide: Communication and Marketing (2012 edition)

While you are on it, you might also want to check out our Social Media Monitoring Guide and our Study on the usage of the Facebook Like button across countries.

Yes, it is free. No strings attached. If you like, help spread the word and click on the Like button. Thanks!

Yes, you can share it with anyone. Just be kind and mention the source.

And yes, we have a Twitter account: @babla

Helle, Jean and Andreas

We live in an era of information, it is everywhere, can be accessed from anywhere and can be needed at anytime. The exponential amount of information available has made it challenging to find the right piece of it. Where to look for it? How to look for it? Our language forum, that recently celebrated its fourth birthday, is moving onto a brand new redesigned layout to help you swiftly communicate among language lovers!

Thousands of existing topics
Over the last few years, our forum has been the theatre of numerous exchanges about languages, cultures and people. Because of the steadily increasing amount of new entries, we decided to completely rethink our forum to make it easier for our users to browse through it.
Thanks to the search bar, you can now enter one or a few key words that will show you related questions. If the answer to your question is already available, you can now check it immediately! No need for you to go through every single question.
You can write your question in any language of your choice and about any language you are curious about. However, it is likely that you are not willing to read about all languages. Fortunately, the forum will display threads that match your language skills and thus have topics displayed related to the languages you speak. No redundant topic, only what you’re interested in!

A customizeable forum that fits your needs
Waiting for someone to answer your questions is probably not your only task of the day. We understand that, which is why you can now receive email notifications of new answers, comments or other activity that you choose to keep yourself updated to. Quick and easy, the information comes to you!
Challenge yourself: check the newest and the unanswered questions in a click. You can probably shed some light on someone’s doubts, so don’t think twice and start lending a hand to other users. Your good deed of the day can be a lot of fun too!
You can customise your profile and your settings (login required) at will. Select questions, topics, users and languages that you want to read about and interact with. Never miss an update and decide what you wish to know about.
Don’t wait any longer and throw yourself into a game of Asking & Answering!

Jean

Image credit: Andrezor, SXC

Some claim that learning foreign languages is a waste of time, that translators are soon to disappear from the professional market and that technology can get you from language A to language B in no time, for free and without any trouble. Myth or reality? The debate is open; however it is true that technology can be a helpful tool and a myriad of online translation software – also known as machine translation system or “MT” – can be found on the web. So many that it may be challenging to find the right MT for the right text. This is why we have a run a cross-comparative analysis between four MT – Systran’s Babel Fish, Google Translate, PROMT and Microsoft’s Bing Translator and using five languages.

The set-up: Turn on the machines!
Machine translation technology is a complex science. There are many types of MT, among others statistical, hybrid, rule-based or sentence-based. We decided to focus on the user’s perspective and test the four MT efficiency, leaving the technical part aside. If you wish to learn more about the different types of MT and how they work, please check Hutchins and Somers.
In order to carry out this experiment, we gathered a corpus of 500 sentences, submitted to the aforementioned four MT. Ten language combinations were put on trial – 50 sentences per combination. These are English-French, English-German, English-Spanish, English-Italian, English-Portuguese and reversed. Each sample of 50 sentences was translated via each of the four MT and their respective results evaluated on a scale from 0 to 3. 0 for untranslated or not understandable results, 1 when the meaning had to be guessed, 2 when the gist was correct with grammatical mistakes and 3 for translation that would almost compete with the work of a professional translator. Each MT could gather up to 120 points per language combination evaluated.
Because we wanted the corpus of sentences to be as well-balanced as possible, we selected 5 sentences of 10 different areas in each batch. These are advertisement, business, financial, gastronomic, legal, literature, medical, religious, slang and Tweet. Each of those features their own difficulties when it comes to translation. This is why we designed a breakdown of their respective scores for each language combination in order to find out which domains are well-handled by MT and which ones are not.

Overall results: Who wins the battle?
Here are the results that we obtained:

Chart 1. Comparison between 4 MT across 10 language combinations
Unit: points (out of a maximum attainable of 120)

The results show interesting trends. Overall, Google Translate seems to be providing a better translation than the other MT, followed by Bing Translator and Systran and PROMT at the end. The only instance where Bing scored highest is for Spanish-English. Some language combinations such as French-English, Italian-English or Portuguese-English managed to spawn relatively good results; Google Translate gathered over 80 points out of 120 in these combinations – close to 75% of perfect translation. However, Spanish MT results were across all four of them very weak. Likewise, German turns out to be more challenging to translate, as source text and as target text alike. Winner: Human translation. Runner-up: Google Translate.

The chart below shows how well each MT performed across all languages and how many point they gathered out of a total of 1,200. Because some language combinations, as well as some areas of translation, are so challenging the overall results are very average: only a third of the text produced is correct for PROMT and Sytran, about half of it for Bing and Google. There is still significant progress to be done before MT can be used with perfect reliability and accuracy.

Chart 2. Total of points gathered across all languages
Unit: points (out of a maximum attainable of 1,200)

Digging deeper: Results across subjects areas
From the graphs below, we can identify some trends. On the “winning” side, medical translation (probably due to the straight-forward descriptive texts) is what can be best handled by MTs, being in the top 3 in 7 out of 10 language combinations. Advertisements are generally well translated as well – 6 times in the top 3, once in the bottom 3. This is generally because ads use simple sentences easy to remember. Finally, recipes (gastronomic) appear 5 times in the top 3 twice in the bottom 3. This area did especially well when English is the source language as recipes are written in the imperative mode in English, an easy mode for MT to handle.
Looking at the bad players of the experiment, literary translation is, without much surprise, the worst case scenario for MT: elaborated syntax, rare words and unusual figures of speech, among others. As a result, literature made to the bottom 3 in 9 of the combinations. 7 times in the bottom free – both slang and Tweets. Slang uses metaphorical speech, which is usually translated literally by the MT, resulting in a nonsensical segment. Tweets contain exclusive elements the other sentences do not have, such as colloquial abbreviations, URL or symbols (#, @). These sometimes induced MT to make mistakes, in addition to the often bad quality of language used on Twitter: abbreviations, slang words, etc. See the detailed results on the graphs below.
Regardless of what you need to translate, do not expect perfection from MT. They can and do produce intelligible results in most cases, given that the source text is basic, well-written and not too ambiguous, if at all. Out of the four MT tested, Google Translate turned out to be the best one to use in most occurrences. Texts that are generally speaking factual (medical, gastronomical) are MT-friendlier than creative writing (literature, Tweets). Plain texts and simple sentences are consequently easier for MT as they avoid multiple possible translations – this is known as controlled language. Finally, we would like to advise you against relying solely on MT for important subjects or published texts – that could bring you serious embarrassments!

Chart 3. Percentage of successful translation for English-French

Chart 12. Percentage of successful translation for Portuguese-English

Jean

This week we had an anniversary: our 20th language has been launched! bab.la now (theoretically ) connects to 95 % of all online users in the world – wow! Our new language is Danish and we are more than happy to give you the chance to discover the language of the Scandinavian country. Who wouldn’t like to know The Little Mermaid’s original name or use the letter ‘ø’?

We hope you will enjoy using the English-Danish dictionary!

Andreas

Image credit: Wikipedia

Before we dig into the numbers, some points to consider:

Now, let’s take a look at the numbers. This first graph shows us raw data – how many Likes we have per language. As we can see, Spanish, Portuguese and English each have over 700 Likes: they are the largest communities. At the far end, Japanese and Dutch have less than 50 Likes. However, these figures, albeit necessary, are limited in relevance, as they do not take into consideration the percentage of Facebook users in each language community.

Graph 1: Number of Likes per dictionaries according to language

The second graph is essential to find out the results this study is looking to find out. What we can read here is the percentage of Internet users registered to Facebook per language community. Among the most interesting results, it is to be noticed that the Turkish speaking Internet users have been widely seduced by Facebook – close the 85% of them are registered to it. Among Spanish, Italian and English speakers, nearly two thirds are on Facebook. Among the weaker markets, Russia and Japan are lagging behind as only ~8% and ~4% of the respective amount of Internet users have signed up to Facebook. The Japanese most successful social medium is Mixi while Russian speakers used widely VK; hence the weaker Facebook share in these languages.

Graph 2: Percentage of Facebook users per language (as of June 2011)

So which language has the most engaged users?
These are the first exclusive results we can analyse from our study. While we previously determined that the percentage of Russian Internet users registered at Facebook is very weak compared to other languages, that small amount is very active and inclined to like a page: every 377 visitor will like one of our dictionaries. The next most liking language community is already quite far behind with one like every 1,452 visitor and it is Polish. Third comes Japanese, which like Russian is a small yet dynamic Facebook community. Among the most reluctant language communities to like pages are the Italians, the Swedes and finally the Dutch. They respectively give one like every 4,795, 5,583 and 6,109 visitor, even though Facebook is widely used in these countries. This is especially true for Italy where over 65% of Internet users are Facebook members.

Graph 3: Number of visitors required per Like

How do Likes compare across languages?
As we have a very specific service offering we “restructured” the data a bit. This way it’s easier to interpret the results for your business:
Taking Russian as reference for the level of difficulty to get Likes, we obtain the following results:

Table 1: Levels of difficulty to obtain Likes per language

We have divided the language communities into three categories: spontaneous Likers (3-7 points), cool-headed Likers (8-11 points) and reluctant Likers (12 points and more).

As mentioned, the Russian speaking community is by far the most inclined to like a lot, in spite of the limited influence of Facebook. Similarly, Polish, Japanese and Portuguese click on the Like button quite willingly, although less than a third of the Internet users are Facebook registered members. At the bottom of the table Swedish and Italian are major users of Facebook (over 50% of Internet users), however it they are quite reluctant to click on the Like button. Similarly, Spanish, French and Turkish communities have numerous registered Facebook users, especially Turkish and Spanish, respectively ranking 1st and 2nd. Nonetheless, these are cool-headed Likers and it takes an extra effort to have them liking on Facebook, in spite of the craze the social medium has been. Dutch is the only exception to this trend – they do give very few clicks per page; however Facebook is not as widely used in the Netherlands (barely 30%of Internet users).

How do Likes compare across languages?
The result of this analysis is that the more Facebook is used in a country, the harder it is to get the users to click on Facebook Like button. Smaller communities, on the other hand, do it significantly more spontaneously. We see three possible explanations:

1. The usage of the Like button is different across countries and languages.
2. Early adopters are more likely to click on Like, the late majority more hesitant.
3. As Russia, Japan and Brazil have strong national social networks, people with an interest in foreign countries and languages are more likely to use Facebook as their international social network. And those people are more likely to “like” a language portal.

We have plotted the number of Facebook users (as a percentage of total Internet users) against the difficulty level. If one takes out Russia, Japan and Brazil, there is no apparent pattern. Further taking out Dutch and Turkish (as outliers) there seems to be a slight upwards trend in the difficulty level the more Facebook users there are. So explanation 2 seems to get some (albeit mixed) support. Explanation 1 seems to be most likely. We therefore conclude that the engagement with the Like button is different amongst languages and countries.

Graph 4: Facebook user penetration (% of total Internet users) compared to Like difficulty level

We hope you enjoyed our little analysis. We’d gladly hear your thoughts. Maybe you even did your own analysis? Share your feedback in the comments below!

Jean and Andreas

UPDATE: We have updated the Twitter Business Guide. Check out the completely revised 2012 edition here.

Having an online presence has become indispensable in most, if not all industries. Since everyone seems to be connected, having an online presence is not enough and standing out from the crowd demands an extra effort. Your company and your products need to be seen and talked about. You cannot expect your clients to come to you, you must reach out to them. To start, there is no better place to do so than Twitter.
Even the most hermetic of social media businesses have heard about Twitter. You may not know what it looks like, how to use it and what benefits you may derive from it, but the name should probably ring a bell. Twitter is one of the most popular and fastest growing means of communication and your company cannot afford to ignore it any longer. The hardest step is always the first one and the good news is, we can show you the right tool to help you make the best of Twitter, step-by-step.

Our Twitter Business Guide: Communication and Marketing explains how to set and optimally use Twitter and related applications for your company at zero costs. It consists of a four-step process:

1. Starting on Twitter
Even if you have no background knowledge in social media, you can set up a Twitter account in a few minutes. This chapter explains how to lay the ground works of your profile, interact with other users and use basic commands.

2. Using Twitter as a communication tool
As Twitter is not like every other means of communication, there are tricks and gadgets to optimise communication on Twitter.

3. Using Twitter as a marketing tool
Ultimately, your Twitter account is here to bring you some attention. How to be read, how to create a large network and how to best reach your users – this section answers all these questions.

4. Linking Twitter to your Business
Bridging your Twitter account to your business is essential and must be done smoothly. All the key ingredients of how to do so are depicted in this last chapter.

All you can do with Twitter is listed in this easy step-by-step guide. The ultimate handbook for online marketing rookies and veterans alike to become a successful Twitterer can be downloaded for free by clicking on the link below:

Download the Twitter Business Guide: Communication and Marketing

Also make sure to check out our free Social Media Monitoring Guide on how to monitor what people on the web say about you and your company.

Jean and Andreas

Follow the authors: @babla (corporate), @JohnBarre (Jean) and @schroetera (Andreas)

Image: Copyright Twitter.

You are welcome to copy, distribute and use this guide as long as you mention the original source (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License): http://bab.la/

This feature hasn’t been rolled out for all languages yet and we are still missing quite a few verbs in some languages. We decided to roll out this feature asap because it is so helpful. Rest assured that we are working hard to include as many verbs as possible in the future.

Have a great weekend!

Andreas

Mission status: 0.0001% or 95%
Based on the known 6912 languages there are 23.891.328 potential dictionary combinations as Patrick pointed out some time ago. With currently 29 dictionaries we have accomplished a little more than 0.0001%. As this sounds rather frustrating we prefer to look at how many people we can reach with our 17 languages. Based on InternetWorldStats we reach about 95% of the online users who speak one of our 17 languages. Now, that sounds a lot better, doesn’t it?

Mission status: 219 countries
Last time I checked we had visitors from 219 countries/territories according to Google Analytics. I don’t know the maximum number but Wikipedia currently lists 203 sovereign states so we are probably quite close to 100%. Most of our users come from Europe (Poland being no. 1 by a slight margin) – on the other side we have Palau with 1 user. In total we reach about 8 million unique visitors per month. What a difference to the 20.000 visitors in our first full month of operations…

Mission status: Accomplished?
Looking back we have accomplished quite a lot – starting with new products like our quizzes or vocab flashcards to our iPhone dictionary apps, translating our portal into 17 languages and adding new content every day with the help of our users. But: There are still 23.891.299 dictionary combinations to go. That means: Back to work! But not before I post another screenshot of today’s homepage for our memorabilia album.

Cheers to all language lovers out there – to another four exciting years!

Andreas

Publishing your own opinion on the web is done within minutes, sometimes seconds (for example by clicking the Facebook like button). Many companies still fail to realize that this is not only a threat (“People say bad things about my company that are not true (or true but I don’t want them to share this)”) but also an opportunity. An opportunity to learn what people like and don’t like about your product, service or company. We at bab.la have developed many features based on user feedback, be it the keyboard feature in our dictionaries or the development of an entire new product such as the phrasebook. If you are really lucky, users will use your contact form or write you an email about what they like or don’t like. But most often you are not (or have you won the lottery lately?). Still, people talk about you, you just need to listen carefully. In their own blogs, on twitter, on Facebook, in videos, as comments and so forth. It’s up to you whether you want to listen to them. Why is it so important?

1. You learn a lot.
This is unfiltered feedback, the most valuable of all. Don’t take everything for granted as the people who voice their opinion might not be a good sample of your target audience. But take it into consideration.

2. You can find your ambassadors.
Believe it or not some people are very enthusiastic about your product / service / company without you having to pay for it. They promote you even though they get nothing out of it (moneywise). Reach out to them, let them know that you are listening, share updates with them, ask for their opinion and you will gain ambassadors for life.

3. Your response will be valued highly.
It’s not only about listening but also about joining the conversation. Joining – not steering. Have your say, be open-minded, talk on eye-level, even agree to disagree sometimes. Your users will value your opinion. You are going to be surprised how surprised your users are going to be when you comment on their blog posts, tweets etc. Don’t let the few trolls out there (who always try to get into an argument) scare you away. Let them have their rumble – focus on the majority of users who really value you.

So by now you are hopefully convinced that it is good to know what’s going on out there on those social media platforms. I know how tight budgets can be so I put together a detailed Social Media Monitoring Guide which helps you set up your social media monitoring at zero costs. You’ll find a compact version for the more experienced user on Kirsten Winkler’s blog.

Download here: Free Social Media Monitoring Guide

Also check out our free Twitter business guide.

Enjoy and share!

Andreas