Facebook Wants To Know If Posts In Your News Feed “Feel” Like Ads

Facebook has set a very high bar for advertising on its network, pushing for ads that “delight” users as much as posts from your friends and family.

Hitting that mark — or at least approaching it — is important for Facebook as it works to balance revenue generation with the need to make sure its users aren’t flooded with advertising. That’s why Facebook engineers are continually fiddling with the dials of the News Feed algorithm to make sure users are being served content that will keep them satisfied and coming back for more. Most of that tinkering happens under the hood, without users’ knowledge, but occasionally market research efforts surface publicly.

That’s the case today. Ben Sharpe, digital marketing manager with UK-based DPOM, was served a survey asking him to judge whether a series of posts from his Facebook feed felt like advertisements:

You’ll note that the in-feed prompt came on a post about revelations that Facebook had conducted research on 700,000 Facebook users without their knowledge. Probably coincidental, but a bit ironic, nevertheless.

Do you think this is a sign that Facebook will be more transparent in its market research?

Below are two more screen grabs of the survey courtesy of DPOM. You can see more on DPOM’s blog.