Nissan Americas is launching a Spanish-language Facebook page, offering Spanish-language information on Nissan's vehicles. The reason, according to Erich Marx, Nissan's director of interactive marketing, is obvious: "Research shows that Latinos - who make up a rapidly growing demographic segment with a high proportion of young people — are using social media to find their voice and engage with consumer brands," he says. "We view our Spanish-language presence on Facebook as a critical channel for connecting with the Latino community."

Indeed, social media could prove, in some cases, to be the only channel by which a brand needs to connect with the Latino community.

Foreign Markets

Social media, of course, has long been recognized as being a good vehicle for companies to make inroads into foreign markets. However, there is also data that suggests it serves just as well when targeting Hispanics outside of their traditional markets. Lee Vann, founder and CEO of Captura Group, has found that it doesn’t makes sense to provide a complete Spanish language version of an e-commerce site. Rather, he wrote for Mediapost, targeted Hispanic advertising including social media, Spanish language customer support and relevant Spanish language content "can go a long way in building relationships with online Hispanics."

The Netflix Example

Netflix, for example, has experienced "meteoric growth" among Spanish preferring and bilingual Hispanics in the past year, he wrote. Like Nissan's Marx, Vann points out that Spanish preferring and bilingual online Hispanics are young and thus likely to have kids — which is a strong customer segment for Netflix. "Although Netflix.com does not offer a Spanish language experience on its website, it did proactively target Hispanics via online advertising in the past year," Vann wrote.