Last month, the Washington Post reported that Dell earned US$3 million in web sales from Twitter followers, making the company one of the first recognizable brands to turn its online cadre of followers into a tangible source of revenue. Dell occupies a coveted spot on the list of the 100 companies with the largest follower counts, along with just a few other brands, including Zappos, WholeFoods, and JetBlue. Twitter continues to attract users from around the world and businesses begin to demonstrate the business case for the social media phenomenon. This begs the question, “How will they tackle the language barrier?”

According to Swedish web performance tracker Pingdom, the countries buzzing the most about Twitter so far in 2009 are, in order of growth: the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, Portugal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Africa. Nearly every country on the list is predominantly English-speaking.

We compared the list of fastest-growing Twitter markets to our recently-published ranking of the 30 countries around the world with the highest levels of online spending power (“Countries That Matter Most Online in 2009,” Jun09). The surprise? Our list of top 10 countries ranked by economic importance contains only four of the places with the most impressive Twitter uptake. What this means is that Twitter is missing out on some of the most important online communities, including many of the places that have the most money to spend.

To determine which languages matter most on the web, many companies use metrics from Common Sense Advisory, including Total Available Audience (TAA) – a number that captures the size of a potential audience at a country level, or for a language group across multiple countries – and what we call online gross domestic product (eGDP) — the economic potential of specific countries and languages.

So, until the social media phenomenon gets on board with the world’s most economically viable languages, how can Twitter users make sure that their messages leap past the Anglocentric barrier? There are three basic options:

1. Regular translation. Ask your regular language services provider (LSP) to translate your organization’s tweets. Request bundled pricing and fast delivery up front, or expect to be hit with minimum fees and rush charges. Beware that most LSPs do not have business models that lend to translating 140 characters or less.
2. Crowdsourced translation. Companies like SpeakLike and TwiTrans (through OneHourTranslation) have already developed Twitter-specific offerings, use a crowdsourcing model to quickly turn around human-translated tweets.
3. Machine translation. A bevy of solutions exist for those who are not as concerned with the quality of the output in other languages. Tools that work with Google Translate prevail in this category, which includes Tweetrans, TweetTranslate, Twinslator, Twitlator, Twitter Translate, and Twitter Translation, among many other tweet-translating tongue-twisters.

And finally, perhaps the best but least-used option of all: transcreated tweets. Your marketing team spends time thinking up catchy tweets to send out to potential customers in English, so you might believe that the best option is to simply recycle these. However, marketing slogans – especially those with limited context — notoriously fail when they fall prey to machine translation.

So, instead of translating messages that may not go over well, why not repurpose in-language content already destined for local markets, to ensure culturally- and linguistically-appropriate tweets? For most companies, the dilemma is a classic one of which comes first, the chicken or the egg — well, in the case of Twitter, the bluebird or the egg.