Even Facebook Finds Time to Listen to its Users

This weekend I have been very much impressed by a simple fact: even behemoths like Facebook still find time to listen to their users. I really thought it was virtually impossible for a single user of such a huge social network to be heard at all but I’ve received a proof that it’s really otherwise and they do care about what we think about their network, even if it takes them a few months. I am not sure how much they will listen to their users’ feedback after the redesign is rolled out today - probably they won’t be able to fulfill even half of the requirements, since they are all so different and some even controversial. But the point of this post is another story that has made me rethink the issue of user visibility.

Let me start with a little prehistory. Back on the 9^th of May I noticed a pretty offensive Russian-language ad. I have not actually clicked through to see the advertised website and have some extra proof - instead I have chosen to make a screenshot of the page with the ad:

The text above the photo can be translated into English as a B-word that I don’t think is appropriate on Profy while the text below the picture reads something that can be translated as “Videos and photos featuring minor Russian girls”. It was actually not the first time that I saw this particular ad but at that point I think I reached some kind of saturation with looking at the rather offensive ad on Facebook constantly. So I’ve had the screenshot captured, uploaded it to my Flickr account and tweeted the link to my followers. Some people were very surprised it could be possible at all and commented on the photo page on Flickr. Others admitted that Facebook often does strange things with the ads served to international users.

The story did not seem to go anywhere from there, except that I continued to see this very ad for some time and then stopped (I thought the campaign limit was reached simply).

But Facebook still had some further surprises for me as a Russian user: they showed (and continue to show) ads for the largest Russian social network - Odnoklassniki.ru. The screenshot is below and I can’t really figure out why the banner is in English (especially since Odnoklassniki.ru does not even have any English-language version for its users).

I personally think that serving an ad for its main competitor now that Facebook launched its own Russian version is not very reasonable but it looks like they don’t think so. On Saturday I received a message in my inbox from Alex Moskalyuk, a Facebook ads engineer. The message read:

Hey, I noticed your comment regarding bad ads on Facebook targeted to you. Do you remember any wording or perhaps URLs of the offending ads?

Since not only I remembered the wording but had a screenshot on Flickr, I was more than happy to send the link to Alex - after all, when developers want the service I heavily use to improve, I am generally more than happy to help them. In the reply message I also pointed out that I continued to see the ads for Odnoklassniki.ru on Facebook and mentioned that I thought it was not particularly reasonable to sell ad space to a direct competitor.

To my surprise, Alex replied the very same day with an explanation that the offending ad I was so concerned about was disabled (yes, I’ve noticed). He also chose to clarify that advertising from their competitors was not against Facebook Advertising ToS since even on Google AdWords you can be advertised as “search engine”. In my opinion this is another story because AdWords are displayed on a whole range of websites - but Google AdSense publishers have access to competitive ads filter to filter out the ads that are deemed inappropriate, including those by competitors.

I have pondered over the topic of Facebook advertising for a while now since I’ve already heard the voices concerned about inappropriate ads served to Facebook users. But this post is actually to share my appreciation of the fact that a behemoth like Facebook actually reacts to users’ feedback - even when it is not submitted to them directly and simply tweeted instead. Even though the feedback took two month to reach them, it still matters a lot to me. We have already talked about the importance of listening to your users on social media and there’s no doubt it is extremely important for startups only working on building brand awareness for their products. But when a network with millions and millions of international users chooses to listen to the users everywhere it can - and even reacts to their complaints, this is amazing and it really proves that every single voice online can be heard.