How to Protect Your Facebook Page from Spam

Two-way communication is the strength of social media, which pulls common people as well as marketers into the fold, but this openness also poses a threat of spammers blocking your communication with your customers. Therefore, it becomes imperative for a company to step in and block the spammer from plaguing your brand page on Facebook.

Having said that, I would like to mention that unlike blogs, forums, and other places, where blocking spam is easy and can be done by the use of some tools, blocking spam on Facebook means putting a dedicated person in charge of the affair, and if you are managing your business page then I suspect you already have a person dedicated to the task.

Apart from this, in the following paragraph I’ll suggest some of the ways in which you can protect your Facebook Page from Spam.

Block profanity

The very first step towards blocking spam is to set profanity Blocklist to strong. You can get to this feature by clicking on the edit page link and then on manage permission link. Towards the bottom of the page, you will find a drop-down menu against Profanity Blocklist text. Set it to strong.

Once you have done that, you need to enter all the spam words that you can come up with in the box beside Moderation Blocklist, which will be right above Profanity Blocklist. There will be some generic spam words and then there will be some specific to your industry. For generic ones, you can visit this link, this link, and this link. And for industry-specific words, you’ll need to do some research, if you already do not know that.

Set the visibility of non-fan posts on your wall

The next step in the process is to set the visibility options of “post by others” to hidden from the page. This will help you counter half of your spam. You would also like to uncheck the button on the right of “Show the box for “Recent posts by others”.

You should also limit the posting ability of your fans. This is upto you to decide, which obviously will be based on your strategy.If you want your fans to start a thread, post updates, and add photos or videos to your wall or not. You also need to decide on the “Tagging Ability”. See the image above to ascertain the location of this feature.

If you do not have anything to do with people outside India, you can also think of employing “Country Restrictions” filter to counter the spam from countries that are out of your interest area.

Employ a human to keep track

Once the above steps are taken, it is time to employ a real human from your company to track users’ activities on Facebook. The role of this person will be to see which users are misusing the platform that you have created. The person should immediately delete anything that does not fit on the page, and if there are repeat offenders, they should be blocked.

You might be worried about human hours required to do this job, but your fear is baseless because regardless of size of your Facebook fans, there will be only some percentage who will be very active. And the time needed to manage it will gradually diminish.

It’s time now to go ahead and implement the ideas shared here, and let me know what you think about this article by posting your comments in the comment box below.

Image Source pasukaru76