Arabic social media content for GCC brands: a workflow
ยท Guides
Pick Gulf Arabic or Modern Standard Arabic by audience, choose bilingual or separate posts, check layout and timing, and have a native speaker review.
Choose the Arabic by audience: Gulf Arabic for friendly consumer posts and Modern Standard Arabic for formal or official ones. Decide once whether you post bilingually or in separate posts. Then check right-to-left layout and Gulf timing, and have a native speaker approve every post.
Step 1. Gulf Arabic or Modern Standard Arabic. Modern Standard Arabic is the shared written form. Gulf Arabic is how people speak in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the neighbouring states, and brands use it in writing for a warm, direct tone. A simple rule: use Modern Standard Arabic for banks, healthcare, government, legal notices, official announcements and LinkedIn. Use Gulf Arabic for retail, food, entertainment, Reels captions and replies to comments. Many brands mix the two, with a Gulf tone in the hook and plain standard Arabic in the details.
Step 2. Write in Arabic, do not convert English. A caption translated word for word often sounds stiff. Jokes, idioms and calls to action rarely carry over. Write the Arabic version from the same brief as the English one. Dialects differ between countries, so a word that sounds natural in Riyadh can sound odd in Dubai, or the other way round. Keep a short list of approved words and phrases for each market.
Step 3. Bilingual or separate posts. One post with both languages is quick and keeps one set of likes and comments. It also makes a long caption, and the Instagram limit of 2,200 characters is counted across both languages. Mixed-direction text can read awkwardly, so put each language in its own block with a blank line between them, and lead with the language your main audience reads first. Separate posts for each language read more cleanly and can go out at different times, but they double the number of posts to approve.
Sending each language to the right place. In Wisp you can send one post to several connected accounts and write a separate caption for each one. For example, an Arabic caption can go to your Instagram account and Facebook Page, and an English caption to LinkedIn, with the same image, in one step. A single image works on all three. Each account is its own post, so each has its own result and its own approval record.
Step 4. Right-to-left layout on images. In an Arabic image the text is right-aligned and the eye starts on the right. Put the headline, the logo and the call to action where an Arabic reader expects them, and reverse arrows and progress bars. Do not flip photographs or logos. Pick one style of numerals, Western digits or Eastern Arabic digits, and use it everywhere. Leave a safe margin, because networks crop images in feeds and grids. Open the final crop on a phone and read the Arabic letter by letter, since joined letters are easy to break.
What Wisp does with direction. The caption box in the Wisp composer sets its direction from the text, so an Arabic caption lines up right to left and an English one left to right. The post previews follow the same rule. In the studio you can crop an image for each placement, and every finished image waits for a person to review it before it goes into a post. Use that review to read the Arabic on the final crop.
Step 5. Timing for the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The weekend differs. Saudi Arabia keeps Friday and Saturday. In the UAE the weekend is Saturday and Sunday for most employers. The Wisp calendar runs Sunday to Thursday or Monday to Friday, so each market can have its own week. Each market also keeps its own clock, Asia/Dubai for the UAE and Asia/Riyadh for Saudi Arabia, and Riyadh is one hour behind Dubai. Check your own account insights before you move a slot to the evening.
Step 6. Ramadan, Eid and National Days. Plan these first and work back. Ramadan moves about ten to eleven days earlier each year, and its start is confirmed by moon sighting, so keep your plan flexible by a day or two. Many brands move key posts to the evening after iftar and keep the tone calm and respectful. Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha also follow the moon. UAE National Day is on 2 December. Saudi National Day is on 23 September and Saudi Founding Day is on 22 February. UAE and KSA public moments are built into the Wisp calendar, beside the brand events your team adds. Place each date first, then leave lead time for creative, review and approval.
Keep the markets apart. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are not one audience. In Wisp the two markets can share a workspace without merging their calendars, audiences or exact publishing accounts. That lets a Dubai post and a Riyadh post differ in dialect, timing and offer while one team plans both.
Step 7. Native speaker review. Ask a native speaker from the target market to read every post before it goes live. Not any Arabic speaker, but someone who knows how the audience in that country writes. They check spelling, dialect, tone, imagery and the Arabic inside images. They also check hashtags: use underscores between words, because a space ends a hashtag. Make this person the named approver, so no Arabic post is scheduled before they say yes.
Approvals in Wisp. Approvals start on the Pro plan. You name the approver, the approver sees the draft and the creative that need a decision, and the decision is recorded on the post. Approving a draft does not publish it, because publishing is a separate step. Wisp records who approved what, and the language review stays with the person you name.
A one-page language guide. Write down, for each channel, which register you use, ten words and phrases you always use, words you never use, your numeral style, your hashtag rules and the name of your reviewer. Share it with everyone who writes or designs. It saves rework later.
A free check of where you stand. If you want to see how your brand shows up on social today, Wisp offers a free, private social audit in English or Arabic. It starts with your website, and every finding says what was measured, how and when.
Where Wisp fits. The Wisp planning calendar holds UAE and KSA moments next to your own launches, schedules in Asia/Dubai and lets each market keep its own working week. The studio holds each finished image for review. Together they give you the lead time and the review step this workflow needs.
Next step. Pick one market and one channel. Write the one-page language guide, name your native-speaker reviewer, and plan your next Ramadan, Eid or National Day post with real lead time. Then roll the same steps out to your other markets.