“Opera, Opera on the wall. You’ve hidden our Facebook posts – where are they all?”

What’s happening?

From today, to help us focus attention on your comments and questions, the Opera Facebook page will no longer have the public wall posts to the left of the timeline. Of course, everyone can still comment on our timeline wall posts (to let us know what we are doing right and wrong); this change will mean we can spend more time answering questions and issue reports via direct message as much as we can.

We’ll be trialling it for a bit to see what works best for all our user communities on the Facebook page, so be sure to let me know your feedback. 🙂

Why the change?

At Opera, we’re all about people getting access to the web but also having ways to communicate about whatever is important to them at the time. (No joke – you should see our internal staff chat channels. They can be full weirdness and wackiness in the best possible way.)

The trouble comes when noise starts to drown out communication. For as long as my team can remember, we’ve had an interesting, tricky challenge with, what many would call “spam” (although I prefer the term “level 10 super random comments”) on our Facebook wall.

Sometimes non-sensical, often irrelevant and always a huge amount (over 750 a day!). And, the ever-increasing volume means that sometimes relevant comments and questions have been getting lost in the vortex. Not cool.

Who is answering comments on Facebook … and beyond?

We don’t have a huge team of dedicated community support agents (although a girl can dream right?). Instead, we have a small, dedicated group of awesome Opera employees who spend some of their time everyday to help where they can. Some of them are in the social-media team, while others are actually building the apps, but all of us just really value talking to our community and hearing what you think.

As much as we enjoy the chats, for us, the most important thing is that you get the information, answers and channels to give feedback that you need – quickly. That’s why we’ve made this change today, but we’re also focusing a lot this year on improving all our support channels from the FAQ pages, opera.com, in-app support and beyond.

Final note from Ruth

As our communities across the world grow, including our Facebook-ers, I hope we can not only help you make the most of our useful apps and browsers, but also just enjoy sharing information and having your say in what’s going on, because isn’t that what the web is about?

If you have any questions about our community support, what we’re doing on social media (or just anything really, I’m pretty friendly :P) leave me a comment below, or you can find me on Twitter @Gradexpatations.

 

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