Did you know that Spanish is the world's second most-spoken language by native speakers after Mandarin Chinese? With 500 million native Spanish-speaking people, Spanish is the third most-used language on the Internet.
How does this important fact affect social media? Many social media sites give the user the option to create an account and navigate their site in Spanish. Facebook, Flickr, My Space, Reddit, Typepad, Wikipedia and Wordpress all offer Spanish as the language to effectively use their site to post, search or share images and ideas with the rest of the world.
Flickr has become such a popular site among Spanish speakers, that flickerinos is the common word being used in electronic conversation to refer to Spanish language users of this site.
The multilingual aspect of the Internet is clear. In addition to Spanish, you can create accounts and surf social media sites in Arabic, Catalan, Dutch, Finnish, French, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Swedish, among others.
Closer to home, the National Football League (NFL) and Major League Baseball (MBL) have interactive sites in Spanish that serve the Hispanic community following the two most popular sports in the United States.
The NFL site www.nflatino.com, and the MLB site http://mlb.mlb.com/es/index.jsp?c_id=mlbis, are huge and very easy to use.
A sample below highlights the popularity of Spanish as a social media language.
Wikipedia, http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Portada
Facebook, http://es-es.facebook.com/
Flickr blog in Spanish: http://blog.flickr.net/es
Flickr in Spanish, click on www.flickr.com and select Español at the bottom.
My Space, http://latino.myspace.com
Typepad, http://www.sixapart.com/es/typepad/
Reddit, www.reddit.com and select Español
Alejandro “Alex” Torres
Hispanic PR & Marketing, CWCBlog Team