Social Media For International Self-Publishers

It’s been a while since I last posted anything on this blog, but I needed some time to figure out what to do next, as communicating in more than one language isn’t always straightforward, especially when it comes to social media.

Multilingual communication can be challenging

I have done a lot of experiments and research and there is much information about social media on the internet, but unfortunately, most of it doesn’t work well for me. Especially Facebook has never been something that I enjoyed very much and I have given up on it for the time being. I tried to create different pages in different languages, but it was too much work and didn’t really lead anywhere. I still have a private Facebook account, where I find posts in different languages due to my very international contacts, and sometimes I see interesting posts that I can hardly read and often not at all, let alone comment on them. As much as I am in favour of learning as many languages as possible, there is simply a limit to it. Nobody can speak every language on the planet. I had to find a different solution for my needs, as I do not have one dominant language, but I communicate about as much in German as in English.

YouTube videos with subtitles in different languages

I have now decided to create a YouTube channel with audio in either English or German and subtitles in at least the other language. The following short video was mainly created for my German blog about London, therefore I have recorded the audio in German, but by clicking on CC you can choose to watch it with English subtitles. The subtitles allow me to use videos for my English as well as for my German blog at the same time and I am planning to do more subtitled videos in various other formats in future.

Here is my first short and humble video: