Second-Gen Hispanics Use Bilingual Social Nets

Young Hispanics want social media that’s delivered in a bilingual environment, says Boston-based social media company Communispace.

The company reached that conclusion via a study of 1,000 consumers that looked at how Hispanic consumers participate in web-based forums. The study also found that:

• Hispanics, regardless of age, income, primary language, gender or generation, give willingly of their time and ideas in a private, online forum. Their rate of contributions - almost six per week - indicates an above-average level of engagement compared to similar English-language communities.
• Second-generation Hispanics demonstrated lower participation rates than their less acculturated, first-generation counterparts, indicating that they may feel less comfortable communicating in Spanish-only environments than in bilingual ones. The finding suggests that marketers should strive to communicate bilingually with acculturated Hispanics, so as to more closely match their offline lives.
• Second-generation Hispanics are often less proficient at writing Spanish than at speaking it. The study suggested that marketers should take this distinction into account when seeking to engage with Hispanics through predominantly written channels such as online forums.

Communispace has created private online communities for companies like Kraft, Hewlett-Packard, Charles Schwab, Hallmark and Unilever.

There will be 13.5 million Hispanic households in the U.S. by 2010, according to The Conference Board. That’s more than double the number of Hispanic households in 1990. Hispanic households will control $670 billion in personal income by then, writes MediaPost.