Abstract: Social media serves as an important communication channel for people affected by crises, creating a data source for emergency responders wanting to improve situational awareness. In particular, social listening on Twitter has been widely used for real-time analysis of crisis-related messages. This approach, however, is often hindered by the small fraction of (hyper-)localized content and by the inability to explicitly ask affected populations about aspects with the most operational value. Here, we explore a new form of social media data collected through targeted poll ads on Facebook. Using geo-targeted ads during flood events in six countries, we show that it is possible to collect thousands of poll responses within hours of launching the ad campaign, and at a cost of a few (US dollar) cents per response. We believe that this flexible, fast, and affordable data collection can serve as a valuable complement to existing approaches.