This article was originally published in Dutch in 2011 and has been translated and updated in October 2026.
When this article was written in early 2011, almost every company had someone on the payroll who dealt with social media in one way or another. Often this was an intern or a junior communications employee. And that was perfectly understandable. After all, we were dealing with a relatively young subject that most people knew and understood very little about. Facebook had existed since 2004, Twitter since 2006, and LinkedIn a little longer, since 2003. So many companies chose to feel their way first and experiment a little.
Building a bond with your customers
And yet these social networks had managed to stir up the business world considerably in a very short time. It was clear that these networks had enormous potential, especially when it came to strengthening the bond with customers. How to strengthen that bond, however, was still a big question for most companies.
Who is your target audience?
Companies that use social media do need to realise a few things. One of the most important things when using social media is to ask yourself who your target audience is, where they are and how you want to and can reach them. After all, that is exactly what you do with a TV, print or radio campaign.
A distribution platform
The fact that social media lets you reach a lot of people was no longer news, even then. Most marketers also knew that you can target very precisely. You can see exactly who you are sending your message to. And that means you can, and should, tailor your message accordingly. Unfortunately, not everyone does.
Heineken on Facebook
In the months before writing this piece, I kept a close eye on Heineken’s Facebook fan page. Just before New Year, Heineken started a campaign to generate more ‘Likes’. At the time of writing (February 2011), just over 1 million people were ‘fans’ of Heineken on Facebook. That is a very respectable number.
As a marketer at Heineken, you therefore had a distribution platform that let you communicate directly with 1 million fans. The great thing about Facebook fans is that they have actively indicated that they want to receive your messages. An update on Heineken’s Facebook page would therefore appear in the news feed of all these fans.
Facebook analytics
In every form of communication, it is essential to get a clear picture of your target audience. That applies to social media communication too. As the owner of a Facebook page, you had access to Facebook Insights, where you could view all kinds of statistics about your page. Because we want to know who our fans are, we looked at the ‘demographics’ section. The original article illustrated this with a screenshot of the MarketingMonday fan page.
These statistics let you see clearly what kind of audience you are dealing with. For a brand operating worldwide, like Heineken, the diversity of nationalities will be far greater than for MarketingMonday. Brazil, for example, was a very large and important market for Heineken. That would mean a considerable share of its fans came from Brazil. And so a large majority of Heineken’s fans would come from countries where Dutch is not spoken.
To map out where your fans come from and where they are, you can use social media monitoring software alongside Facebook’s own statistics.
Language
What was striking about Heineken’s Facebook page was that it communicated mainly in Dutch. Of course, we did not know the reasons for this, nor which objectives Heineken had linked to its social media activity. Even so, we could look at the interaction generated by the Dutch posts, put it next to the English posts and compare the two.
A big difference
I compared three random Dutch-language posts with three random English-language posts published in January 2011, looking at the number of ‘Likes’ and ‘Comments’ per post.
The figures spoke for themselves and needed little explanation. The interaction on an English-language post was many times greater than on a Dutch one.
Heineken communicates mainly in Dutch
If the goal is to generate as much interaction as possible - something we did not know - it seems a logical step to adapt your posts accordingly. Yet since 1 January 2011, Heineken had published 34 posts on its Facebook page. Of these, 27 were in Dutch and only 7 in English.
Deceptive
The problem with an analysis like this is, of course, that we have no insight into the objectives and whether or not they are being met. It could well be that the Dutch-language campaigns were very successful. We had our doubts, however. Why? Because we could see exactly how many people had clicked on Heineken’s links. That was possible through the URL shortening service bit.ly, which at the time offered public statistics for the URLs it shortened. So we could see that in the past week 224 people had clicked on the link in the Facebook post for Heineken’s Valentine’s Day campaign.
Know your audience
The promotion started on 3 February and ended on 8 February. So in 5 days, 0.02% of all Heineken’s Facebook fans clicked on the link. Unfortunately, we could not tell what percentage this was of the Dutch users. At a time when we can see so clearly who we are sending our messages to, it seems only logical to tailor those messages accordingly. As far as we know, Heineken’s TV commercials in Brazil are not in Dutch either.
Relevance. Everywhere. Always.
We always preach that you need to be relevant to your target audience. This article happens to be about Facebook, but it could just as easily have been about any other medium. So make sure you are always relevant to your followers. Do not bombard people with information they are not waiting for, or that they will not understand. As shown above, it will have little effect. Two of my Facebook friends were also ‘fans’ of Heineken on Facebook. One of them lived in Qatar. She certainly does not speak Dutch and will have understood very little of the message. And the chance that she wanted to go ‘to Sensation with Heineken.nl‘ was extremely small too. And that probably applied to around 80% of Heineken’s fans on Facebook.
Communicate in English
One option would be for Heineken to communicate in English on its Facebook page. Most Dutch people have a reasonable command of English, and it is fair to assume they will understand that an international brand like Heineken communicates in an international language. The same applies to people in other non-English-speaking countries. With this option, Heineken would at least make sure its message was understood by a much larger group of its fans.
Map out the most important groups
The other option would be for Heineken to open separate Facebook pages for its most important groups. That would most likely mean a page in English, one in Dutch, one in Brazilian Portuguese and perhaps a couple of other languages. With this option, Heineken could be sure that a much larger share of its fans would be addressed in the right and relevant way. Posts could also be tailored far better to the different audiences. The downside, of course, is that this option is much more labour-intensive. But it would be certain that the effort actually pays off.
Update:
@PeterMinkjan tipped us off that Facebook let you send certain posts only to people with a particular language setting. This meant Heineken could segment perfectly well and stay relevant to its audience. Brazilian or German Heineken fans would therefore not be bothered with Dutch Facebook posts. That makes the comparison between Dutch and English posts a flawed one in this case. At the same time, it partly explains the low engagement on the Dutch Facebook posts.