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Swedish Islanders Upset After Facebook Places Them in Norway

With the sheer size of Facebook and volume of its users, there are bound to be a variety of customer oriented complaints. Some for good reason, and others not, but Facebook still has to address these complaints in kind to see if there is a resolution that will make their users happy and keep them from clicking away from the social media giant for good. One such concern, which has been in the media lately, is that a group of businesses in Gotland, Sweden have been misplaced geographically.

 

How does one misplace an entire city? Facebook is calling it a glitch, but local businesses and residents of the Swedish island is calling it an annoying oversight that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

 

The “glitch” in question is the fact that Facebook has annexed an entire island of 50,000 people and placed them in another country altogether. Facebook users in Gotland noticed a couple of weeks ago that their status updates showed them as being in Norway which could directly affect their tourist trade and hurt many of the local small businesses.

 

When these businesses posed their concerns to Facebook, they assumed it would be handled and everything would be back to normal by day’s end. Now, weeks later, nothing has been done and this is angering many businesses who face dramatic profit losses due to the error.

 

What started out as a “glitch” has now gone viral and many social media advertising companies are getting behind the Gotland businesses. As you already know, many businesses rely on Facebook advertising as part of their marketing plan and seeing ads from Norway, in Norwegian no less, on your customers’ pages in the middle of the Baltic Sea can be very frustrating. Many of these businesses live off of the tourist trade and they are worried about the upcoming season if Facebook doesn’t make the change soon.

 

A spokesperson for Facebook’s Swedish PR firm says that the problem has been reported internally and they are awaiting a reply from Facebook as this goes to print. We will see what the near future brings for the tiny island of Gotland and their businesses; hopefully Facebook will settle the matter quickly.

 

Mandarva Stenborg, whose public relations company represents Facebook in Sweden, said she was still waiting for a reply from the company, four days after first reporting the problem.