Anyone who thinks that the translators, copywriters and editors of Leinhäuser Language Services GmbH are simply chained to their desks day in and day out had a revelation during the audio trade fair High End 2016 in Munich. Visitors and exhibitors at the fair held from May 5-8 were able to get a first-hand glimpse of the multilingual Leinhäuser team in action – unchained from their desks, that is. Working on behalf of the hi-fi magazine “Fidelity,” 10 employees at Leinhäuser served as social media reporters who covered a beat that extended over four exhibition levels. In the process, they reported on the latest developments in the world of hi-fi and audio and produced real-time content for the social media channels of “Fidelity” – in English.
Ingo Schulz, the managing director of the magazine, expressed his delight with the successful reporting team: “The social media team wrote a total of 296 posts for all channels during the four-day fair. These posts reached 68,000 people organically, that is, totally unsolicited. For Fidelity, the positive impact generated by these posts lingered long after the trade fair closed its doors: “Our trade-fair reporting after the event reached 64,000 people in social media. Added to this were 159,000 page views of our two major trade-fair reports on www.fidelity-magazin.de in just one week.”
The Leinhäuser team really enjoyed the job as well. The group’s assignment was to prepare entertaining posts about the trade fair for “Fidelity”. These outsiders to the hi-fi business were asked to look at the trade fair and the exhibits there from a fresh and unexpected angle. And all of them had a great time doing it – the young social media editors on the Leinhäuser team as well as the editors of the hi-fi magazine. Following a detailed briefing, the content was posted directly on customers’ Facebook and Twitter profiles. The tweets could also be read on a Twitterwall at the magazine’s booth, where they caught the eye of many trade fair visitors. Each day, the Leinhäuser team also used smartphones to prepare clips for attention-grabbing video posts on Fidelity’s Facebook page.
English content for English social media channels?
Many German companies conduct their business internationally and communicate in different languages, including English at the very least. But just what is the best way to provide content for English-language social media channels? To write all content in German and then translate it into English? Or to have it prepared simultaneously in German and English? How can you pull this off in Germany on a native speaker level? And just how can you do this on something like a breaking-news basis to meet the fast-paced needs of social media?
At Leinhäuser, social media copywriting has been a part of the company’s portfolio for a long time now. “In social media copywriting, our team usually writes the content in English for our customers. These texts are generally posted on channels like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook,” said Heike Leinhäuser, a co-owner and the managing director of Leinhäuser Language Services GmbH. She employs a number of native-speaker editors for several different languages. Demand is particularly high for English. Leinhäuser’s team has one special strength: It is composed of native speakers of both American and British English. Their job is not to serve as translators. It is to be copywriters. They create the content in English from the very beginning, and they do so by drawing on their experience in journalism and copywriting.
Copywriting for Facebook, Twitter & friends
At Leinhäuser, this unit goes by the name of “Online Editing und Copywriting.” Among its many jobs, the Leinhäuser team prepares content that is primarily used on customers’ social media sites. The editors remain in constant touch with the company’s customers and are integrated into their editorial planning. The native-speaker principle is firmly established at Leinhäuser for both copywriting and translating. English-language texts are always prepared by English natives.
The preparation of social media content in a number of languages is a growing business area at Leinhäuser Language Services. The company got its start in 1997 as a translation agency. Today, it is an all-round text producer with 40 full-time employees and a network of more than 300 freelancers worldwide.
