Rant: Why Facebook has a big problem with its advertising
Facebook’s rise and rise is well documented and continually coveted everywhere from The Times through to the highest profile social media bloggers. It is always lauded as the best platform since sliced bread however I have a few gripes and I just don’t understand why they haven’t fixed them already.
Facebook – The Advertising Platform
I understand why, although irritating, how important Facebook advertisements are as part of a seeding strategy and making people aware of a Facebook campaign.
However, all you need to do if you really want Facebook to get on your nerves is have a play with its pay per click advertising platform yourself. You can use Facebook advertising to either raise brand awareness or to secure clicks and likes to your client’s Facebook pages. I think the concept of people being interested in an advertisement based on them liking a page or interest is a sound one. I also think it will become even more targeted when Facebook rolls out the Want button.
However, please can someone explain to me why the billing platform in Facebook’s back end has to charge a person’s account daily. So if – like me – you work on several Facebook promotions, competitions and Facebook pages it means your account is charged in tiny different amounts every day – why? How does that help anyone? Why can’t the sophisticated system bill you at the end of the month like Google’s PPC Adwords platform? Surely it would make better sense for companies looking to advertise on it. Is there one person out there that really wants to receive 30 individual payments to Facebook from their account each month? I really don’t think so and I think it makes the platform feel like it has been built by Noddy.
I thought maybe it was me missing something so I emailed Facebook directly asking if – after several months of using its advertising platform – I could be moved from the daily billing system to a weekly or even better a monthly schedule. And then this led me to Facebook’s next worst problem – it’s customer service. Yes you read that right – its customer service. In my opinion it is nothing short of terrible. I am sure that most people have heard all of the best practice methods on how to deal with customers and how to treat them using platforms like Facebook. So you would most probably assume that its customer service would be phenomenal and you would be very wrong. I have dealt with them on several occasions and normally you have to wait between 1-2 days to get a response and when and if you do it usually doesn’t help you out and says something generic. On this occasion I was told “We currently cannot bill you in this manner but we will notify the team to improve our product.” Once again that didn’t help me and it’s not as if Facebook’s advertising platform is a new system.
So Mr Zuckerberg if you are listening, add monthly billing to your advertising platform because daily billing is terrible. Rant Over.