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The good news is that this feature is capable of translating various languages such as Hebrew, French, Spanish, Japanese, Thai, and Chinese, you name it. Facebook has successfully rolled out this feature in the late of 2011; however, it has only come to attention by many earlier this year.

Beyond a shadow of doubt, it will definitely be a boon to every user. Hassle of manually translating the comments via Google Translate can now be prevented. An addition of this simple button has made language difference a learning opportunity rather than a language barrier.

For Facebook users who are unaware and have not already tried out the feature, it is powered by Microsoft Bing, another type of machine translator close to the likes of Google Translate. However, machine translation is not flawless. We should not overlook the fact that machine translators only interpret the gist of the content with minimal accuracy.

Machine translators have worked wonder in assisting us to find out the gist of content, however, they should be used with discretion as the translated content may not be professionally sound, most of the time, and hence, definitely should NOT be used for professional and important documents.

On the contrary, to embark on their global presence, Facebook launched an application called “Translations” and through this application, the tedious process was crowd sourced, allowing the millions of Facebook users worldwide to participate in the translation process.

Within a few weeks, Facebook managed to release its first ever localized version in February of 2008 when they launched their Spanish site.For the months to follow, volunteers from all over the world had utilized this application to help translate the social network into every other major language in the world.

After seeing the success of “Translations”,Facebook did not just stop there,instead they continued their global mapping on the other sites and applications across the internet; as long as the site or application uses Facebook Connect, they will be able to leverage on Facebook’s global community in getting it translated into any language that Facebook Translations supports.

This move by Facebook would have epitomized Facebook’s philosophy “Giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected” but on the flipside, Facebook is at the same time patenting this crowdsourcing translations process which had helped transformed them into the global entity they are today, seeking to profit from other networks that are thinking of using similar method to localize their content.

Source: [Facebook Translations,Inside Facebook,TechCrunch]

But the good news for businesses is that we’re living in the era of social media; more specifically social networking; which is fundamentally shifting the way the world communicates and how we look at information, with the advent of social networking sites, this new movement has paved the way for businesses to connect, engage and listen to real people on a global scale.

One name that is instantly associated with social networking is Facebook. Having only started in 2004 as an internal university network, it grew exponentially in the next couple of years. Presently, it offers more than 70 different translations and has recently hit 500 million registered users.

But before you start planning extravagant strategies using Facebook, it’s wiser to have an overview of the other social networks out there, especially the dominant social media networking sites in your target markets. Even though Facebook is generally the most popular social networking site in the world, a host of similar social networking sites still dominate the local social networking scenes in some of the most populous nations in the world.

Take China for instance, the most populous nation in the world. Its social networking scene is being dominated by QQ and Renren, with QQ boasting an astronomical number of 300 million users and counting.

Although Google’s Orkut never seemed to have hit off in most parts of the world, it is the number one social networking site in Brazil, which is listed in the fifth most populated nation in the world. Orkut was also previously the number one social networking site in India (2^nd most populous nation in the world), but according to statistics from comscore, Facebook had recently overtaken them as number one in India.

In the far eastern world, Mixi is the number one social networking tool in Japan and in South Korea, the crown belongs to Cyworld.

In Russia, the scene is dominated by a few local names with Vkontakte heading the pack with Mail and Fotostrana coming close behind.

Another competitor of Facebook, Hi-5; leads the charge in countries such as Mexico, Peru, Romania and Portugal.

Friendster who has lost its leadership position to Facebook, still holds a strong social presence in South East Asian countries like Indonesia and the Philippines.

According to statistics from socialnomics.com, 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations and only 14% trust advertisements. Businesses can now look into leveraging on the prevalent usage of social networking sites as a tool for analyzing social and cultural trends of their target markets.

The revolution of these social networking sites has certainly helped to erase borders and allow people from around the world to be easily connected, making the world a much smaller place.

Such is its ease of use that anyone with basic or little computer knowledge can easily sign up for membership on any of the available social networking sites and place their profile online for the whole world to see.

In terms of cost, it is perhaps the most cost effective platform out there for businesses to utilize as the cost of joining any social networking site and creating a business profile is usually free or at a low cost

With the participants of social networking sites being expected to grow even more exponentially in the next few years, the potential of social networking looks promising; considering the significant opportunities and the extent of its reach, businesses can tap on social networking sites to help expand their global presence.

[Source: Cindy King, Brain Solis - Engage]

Well, Facebook Places is essentially an upgrade which allows location-based checking in. In a nutshell, Facebook Places allows you to be able to tell all of your friends where your current location is. For example, if you are hanging out at your favourite café, you can take out your mobile phone and check-in to Facebook Places. It works the same way as posting your status, except you let your friends know your exact location. Besides that, you’ll also be able to know if your friends are nearby or have just visited this café, amongst many other features.

If you’re already getting all excited about trying out Facebook Places, I will have to burst your bubble as it’s still not available in Singapore yet, but be patient, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.