Facebook Support: Digital Marketers’ Horror
I think it’s about time we talk about that elephant in the room.
Facebook isn’t as great as before. I personally feel this because of my not-so-smooth experiences with Facebook Support.
Facebook is part of almost every digital marketers’ daily needs.
I’ve been working as digital marketing specialist and social media specialist since 2016. These responsibilities of mine require me to do a lot of things from social media monitoring, social media management, and paid ads management through Facebook.
Facebook Ads and Google Ads. The two internet giants. You want to do some SEO-heavy paid ads? Google ads is the lawmaker. But if you want to spread your ads through social media, especially Instagram (and Facebook — let’s face it, we don’t do much on Facebook anymore), Facebook ads is the one you should depend on.
In case you don’t know, Facebook owns Instagram (at least until I write this). We need to access Facebook in order for us to set a much detailed and targeted Instagram paid ads. I am so sad to tell you that this fact is really unfortunate for me and maybe my digital marketer friends.
Is This the Real Life? Is It Just Fantasy?
I was born in the late 80s and grew up in the 90s. I spent my college time sending random quirky poke to my friends on Facebook, back then when Facebook is still the new kid on the block.
I’ve been using the Facebook ads feature since 2016 but I‘ve been using Facebook long before then. I never have a problem before. Nothing to complain about. I think that’s one of the reasons why I find my experience of Facebook Support Horror (starting from 2016) really hard to believe.
The Not-Knowing
My first Facebook digital ads problem in 2016 was about the weird trend of my two almost-similar ad sets. I asked questions through their chat feature and someone from Facebook Support contacted me through email and phone.
The lady who served my complaint is Indonesian who works for Facebook Singapore. She was polite, punctual, professional, but she cannot answer my main question about the Facebook ads algorithm that causes the trend. She told me that she will send my question to their technical team.
I never got my answer. My then-boss stopped asking about it, so I didn’t pursue.
The Not-Solving
After that, I moved into another company with same job description: managing paid ads. Through 2018–2020 I experienced several problems with Facebook ads, mainly about their charging system and payment system. I was quite surprised to find that they hide their chat and email button quite deep. They divert and direct us through one FAQ and another, until finally I could send them an email wait for someone, a human, to contact me.
I thought, maybe they want to reduce the need of human customer service. To get better in data mining. To digitally record every moves, every demands and complains. For a company as big as Facebook, I find that normal. I persevere.
After 2–3 days, they contacted me to talk about my complaint. Still, I didn’t got the help that I need. My questions deflected, their responses wasn’t helping. My problem unsolved and they left it that way. They closed the email conversation with a request for me to give their services a rate. Huh.
The Not-Present
Now, in 2021, I have the simplest problem a social media user could have: I can’t login to my account, the account that I used to manage my company’s ads. I was stuck with Facebook’s new double-authentication system that requires me to login both in my mobile and desktop account. I desperately need to login so I could check my company’s page.
I tried everything that Facebook instructed me, but they rejected my government-issued id card. More than one of my friends are having the same problem.
I tried to file for a report, to put a complaint. I went through their FAQs, page by page. The email and chat feature of Facebook Support are nowhere to be seen.
Their automatic reply is still on. The automatic notification email still saying hello to me, telling me that they can’t process my id card picture. I sent a chat to Facebook Business Support Page (yes they got one) and every of my message was replied by an instruction to check Facebook Business Support FAQ page.
I was thrilled when I found a human behind a Facebook Portal chat feature. But I felt so stupid when they told me that they might have that big Facebook logo on their website, but they’re just a company supported by Facebook. They can not help me with my Facebook login problem.
Of course they can’t.
Is That The Dying Breath that I’m Hearing?
If you pay attention, you do realize that the quality of Facebook Support (in this story of mine) is degrading through 2016 to 2021: from slightly disappointing — major disappointment — to completely disappearing.
It’s like, they don’t care anymore.
For me, this feels like a subtle nudge to move on from the glory of Facebook. Like an elephant sitting in the room, so big, so striking, but I kept trying to pretend that the end is not happening. I told myself: “The trial of Zuckerberg means nothing, the chaos of Trump presidency is nothing, the antitrust movement means nothing,”.
But it’s something. Apparently, it’s everything.
Many Hopes and Prayers
As a digital marketer, I just hope that whatever strategies that Facebook are taking right now, they remember to do the courtesy of tying every ends nicely and kindly before leaving out the room. Because when Facebook Support isn’t there to help, there are ad credits frozen, unspent. There are weird trends unexplained, unable to be learned from. There are accounts unused.
I mean, if you claim a strict double-authentication system as an improvement and you do it for Facebook to stay on top of the game, at least you must make sure that your true (not bot, not fake account) user could get a benefit from it. Now it feels like a smooth move to reduce the number of users.
If Facebook Support will never be 100% dependable anymore, as a digital marketer, I hope that there will be a way to make a detailed and targeted Instagram ads without the need of Facebook Ads Manager. I hope there will be no need to make and link the company’s Facebook page to its Instagram account. I hope there are ways for other companies under Facebook to shine and serve its users flawlessly without unnecessary rules and steps.
As long as the demand is still there, digital marketers will still be surprised and struck by the amazing case of Facebook Support Horror.
But deep down inside, I personally hope that we could move on already from Facebook Ads and be introduced with another social media giant that have a great customer support.
There I said it.
