As the number of people wanting to be our friends and stay connected with Firefox increases, a growing number of those users speak languages other than English. This gives us a big opportunity to interact with them in their own language.

Just as Firefox is localized in over 80 languages, imagine if our Facebook page or Twitter presence was available in 80 languages as well. And what if users could have conversations with other users and Mozilla contributors on those social networks as well? That would be quite a rich experience, and I think it’s an experience we should strive to offer for our 5 million+ users on those networks.

Studies have shown that localized content on these channels offers an experience for users that is several times more engaging. The exciting bit is that we’ve already localized some of our content on our social channels, and it’s proven to be quite successful in engaging our users. We currently localize announcements for Firefox updates and new campaigns, and we also localize our custom tabs on Facebook when possible.

We can improve on this by creating an easy way to offer localized versions of almost all our content on these pages. We could start with a few locales as a trial. We’d create solid experiences and have conversations with those users that is just as compelling as our English content. If successful, we could then add more locales.

What is your favorite way that Firefox content is localized (besides in the product itself)? What organizations or brands have you seen localized content for that have impressed you? Add your thoughts in the comments.

With more than 4.3 million of our users “liking” the Mozilla Firefox page, our Facebook fans truly represent our global community and users. Not surprisingly, less than half of those users (46%) speak English. That means we can’t just offer content in English like many other brands and organizations do on Facebook. So just like the Mozilla websites and our product, we strive to offer a localized experience for our users.

Firefox 4 announcement for German users

And we’ve already started the past couple of months with some localized status updates on the Mozilla Firefox page and in our custom tabs. The status update announcing Firefox 4 was posted in 19 languages. Plus, our Firefox 4 tab is localized and soon our Web Hero tab will be as well.

Web Hero tab in French

Just how global are our users on Facebook? Here are the numbers Facebook provides us:

Top languages

Top countries

We’re continuously thinking about providing content which is even better tailored to Facebook users in different regions of the world who don’t speak English as their first language. Do you know any organizations or brands that have localized Facebook content? Add your favorite to the comments or add your own ideas for localizing content.

Last Thursday to celebrate releasing Firefox 4 RC, we had people from across the Mozilla project participate in a reddit IAmA to talk about Firefox 4. The discussion was a huge success with over 3,100 comments from around 2,000 people. There’s definitely a strong response that people are interested and excited about Firefox 4. And you could tell that the reddit community was delighted and impressed with the honest, personal (and sometimes cheeky) responses they got from Mozillians.

Some of the Mozillians who answered questions on reddit

We had hundreds of great questions and comments. Here a few that caught my eye:

o hai reddit! (introducing the Mozillians)

My grandma wants to know if she’ll “still be able to get the Google” on the new browser. Please advise.

Why is your browser the best browser to ever roam the dark lands of the internet?

I am currently a chrome fanboy. What would be your spiel to get us back?

FF Y U NO RSS button in address bar? (or is that just a rumor?)

Whom do you see as your main competition these days?

And some praise of Firefox 4 as well:

Hi guys! Just wanted to say – love your browser. Thanks very much for being awesome.

You’re on top again in my opinion. Now that you’ve made it a much more minimalistic design (my biggest complaint) you’ve won me back to FF full-time.

I just love your browser. Hats off to Firefox team for all their efforts on Firefox 4.

Big thanks to all the Mozillians who helped response to questions and comments from the reddit community. I heard many of you enjoyed talking with the reddit community, and I know they loved the IAmA as well.

What was your favorite comment? What do you suggest for our next IAmA?

Today we’re doing an IAmA on reddit with people from across the Mozilla project. After releasing Firefox 4 RC yesterday, we’re ready to answer your questions.

For those not familiar with reddit, it’s a passionate + awesome community of people who love the Web. This is the first time we’re doing a sponsored event with reddit, and you’ll see the discussion promoted on the reddit homepage throughout the day. As Mike Beltzner says:

We’re long time reddit fans, and always wondered y we no reddit – so let’s fix that, today. A bunch of us will be checking back here between 10am and 2pm PT (at least) to answer your questions from all over the project.

Bring your questions and join the discussion.

I’m excited to announce that the Army of Awesome page now supports more locales. When we launched the program last October, it only showed English tweets but we knew we wanted to support other languages as well. The page and signpost messages have now been localized in Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. And we’re excited about adding more locales soon.

Army of Awesome in German

Twitter supports 12 other languages so those are the best candidates to localize. These languages are Arabic, Danish, Dutch, Farsi / Persian, Finnish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish, and Thai. If you’re interested in localizing the Army of Awesome for your language, contact Kadir Topal to find out how.

Next up for Army of Awesome, we’ll be adding a Filter button for quickly drilling down to the tweets you want to see and the ability to remove tweets from the list that don’t need a response. Both of these should make it much easier and faster for you to find the tweets you want to respond to.

Big thanks to Kadir Topal, Paul Craciunoiu, and our awesome localizers for adding localization support. If you have any suggestions for the Army of Awesome, leave a comment or add your ideas to the wiki page.

This week the Army of Awesome will add localization support and get some new styling. Looks awesome, right?

Once again the Army of Awesome page is getting some new functionality and a bit of styling polish as well. On Thursday it will gain localization support, making it easy for Twitter users around the world to reply and help fellow Firefox users.

Since Army of Awesome launched in October, it has only shown tweets from users who have their language set as English. Now that the page supports localization, you’ll be able to view the page in your native language and respond to similar users. Localized versions will start appearing as they are completed by our community localizers in the next few weeks.

In addition to localizing the static page content, localizers will also be able to translate or add their own signpost messages for their locales. This will allow communities to provide the most relevant content to their users and give them the flexibility to update their messages on the fly.

Finally, the page will get some cosmetic improvements that match the new SUMO look and take it from a 9 to a 10 in design.

What’s next for the Army of Awesome site? In February we’ll add the ability for users to flag tweets as not needing a response and remove them from the list. We’ll also add a list filter that changes the list to show recent, unanswered, answered, and all (including flagged) tweets. Both of these changes will make it easier for our Army of Awesome to quickly find the tweets they want to respond to.

Want to try it out? Head over to the Army of Awesome page and give it a whirl. Have an idea for a new feature or signpost message? Add it to the wiki page or leave a comment.

We’ve been exploring new ways to engage with our users, and the Army of Awesome is the program I’m most excited about right now. The Firefox Support team (SUMO) has been working hard to improve how we help Firefox users, and the Army of Awesome has become a powerful new channel for making a positive impact on our users. Launched just under a month ago, we’ve already seen 350+ Firefox users reply to over 2200 tweets.

The amazing thing about these replies is that they’re unexpected. Often times these users are delighted to receive a response from a fellow Firefox user. Our users are happy to know that the Mozilla community is listening to them.

We’ve built off the success of the community powered @FirefoxHelp by enabling contributors to tweet from their own accounts. Not only are users helping each other (that’s the nature of SUMO), but our army of contributors are proactively responding to users who haven’t approached us first. Compare that to users who go to mozilla.org to learn more about Mozilla or go to SUMO for help. We’re now engaging with our users in a totally different way.

Although the Army of Awesome isn’t focused on support issues, that is where I see it making the biggest difference at first. A frustrated user that receives a reply resolving their dilemma is thrilled. It might make their day and the user might share the experience with friends.

And situations like this happen everyday offline as well. While waiting at a bus stop last week, I overheard a couple trying to figure out which bus line to take in order to meet up with friends. I chimed in to let them know which bus would take them to their destination, and they were delighted to have someone answer their question. Conversations on Twitter are happening the same way through the Army of Awesome.

While our contributors have been actively tweeting, we’ve also been working on improving the Army of Awesome landing page to make it more useful. Today we’ve updated the page with these enhancements:

New enhancements to the Army of Awesome page:

• Infinite scrolling (want to view more than the 20 most recent tweets? Now you can see hundreds)
• SUMO search box in the sidebar (quickly look up a SUMO article to link to in a reply)
• Timestamps link to twitter.com status permalink
• Usernames and avatars link to user’s profile on twitter.com

As we continue improving the Army of Awesome, we’re looking at ways of making the experience for our contributors more engaging and interactive. We’re thinking about recognizing users who are first to respond to tweets and also our top tweeters. We also want to show our community how many tweets we’re responding to. These ideas and others are being tracked in our website roadmap.

How do you think the Army of Awesome page can be more engaging for our contributors? Add your ideas in the comments.