If you haven’t poked around in Facebook’s professional dashboard recently, it’s likely you’re missing on a few handy features designed to help you manage your business profile.
What is Moderation Assist?
Moderation Assist allows you to automate specific actions to help you control comments and reduce spam on your Facebook Page. You can select from a list of criteria for the author of the comment and for the comment itself to control which types of comments are automatically hidden. With the rapid increase in fake profiles and Pages leaving spam comments across social media platforms, this feature saves a huge amount of time and manual effort by automatically hiding certain comments.
How Do You Set Up the Moderation Assist Feature for Your Page?
Make sure you’re acting as the professional profile you want to manage. Head to the profile’s Page and head to manage page (left-hand side of the screen on desktop or click your profile logo in the bottom right of the screen on the mobile app). Click on professional dashboard and select Moderation Assist from the list. You’ll be presented with a list of criteria that allow you to customise the conditions in which comments will be automatically hidden. Think about which types of comments you’ve hidden in the past to help you decide which criteria to select. If you haven’t needed to hide any comments yet, you might want to start by selecting ‘No friends or followers’, ‘Repeat offender’, ‘Link in comment’, ‘Profanity in comment’ and even add relevant keywords (this allows you to specify words, phrases or emojis you want to hide from your Page).
How Do I Choose the Criteria?
There are ten criteria in total, four that relate to the author of a comment and six for the actual content of the comment. Here is a brief explanation of each option and why you might consider adding it to your list.
CRITERIA FOR AUTHOR
New account
Many brand-new accounts are fake profiles or pages created purely to publish spam content, which is why new accounts are included on the Moderation Assist list. Some new accounts are 100% legit of course, but it’s safe to say that the majority are worth treating with caution.
No friends or followers
No friends or followers is another strong indication of a fake account. Red flags ahoy!
Repeat offender
As the name suggests, this is for accounts who regularly have their comments hidden and therefore are eligible for automatic censorship.
No profile picture
This is a bit trickier because in our experience, fake accounts do tend to have profile pictures in an attempt to appear genuine. Those without profile pictures often don’t want a picture, or they haven’t figured out how to upload one!
CRITERIA FOR COMMENT
Link in comment
Unless you specifically need to allow users to include links in the comments, this should be selected. Spammers love to drop links that look relevant to the content of the post but actually lead you into a digital Narnia (but not as good).
Profanity in comments
The most commonly reported offensive words and phrases on Facebook are included in this catalogue of curses. So, if you don’t want people effing & jeffing in your comments section, switch this on.
Image in comment
If you never ask or require users to post images in the comments, you might as well enable this. It adds another layer of protection against inappropriate content finding its way onto your Page.
Links to specific sites
If you don’t want to banish all links in the comments, you can specify sites right here.
Video in comments
We can’t think of a type of Page that would need to allow users to post videos in the comments. Unless you do, add this option to help prevent spam.
Keywords in comments
Don’t waste time entering profanities here. This is designed for any other keywords you want to ban. If you’ve had lots of spam comments previously and you’ve noticed common words, phrases or emojis that are used, here is where you put them. Note that variations of keywords that use numbers, symbols or different spellings are automatically hidden.
Can I See the Comments That Have Been Auto Hidden?
Yep! Just go to the activity log within Moderation Assist and you’ll be able to see a summary as well as a list of individual moderation events. The list shows the criteria that triggered each event and you can view the post the comment was made on and block the account. If you want to make a comment visible again, just click on the three dots on the right-hand side of the event and select undo.
The screenshot below is taken from a Facebook Page we manage. The Page is in the sports category and it represents a national team. We were forever battling against spam comments every time we published a post. Within seconds we were bombarded with notifications that users had commented on our post, sending us into a frenzied rush to get onto the Page and hide or delete the comments. The comments invariably contained links to match livestreams. Except they weren't. They were all spam. We had to protect our followers from clicking on these fraudulent links, which was disruptive. Discovering Moderation Assist was a gift from the digital heavens.
Should I Be Using Moderation Assist?
Why not? It’s another tool in the war against spam, it takes mere minutes to set up and saves time and effort in the future. If all Pages across Facebook used Moderation Assist, we’d be winning!
Moderation Assist is particularly useful for Pages with lots of followers, or those in specific categories such as sports or news. Spammers often use hashtags and keywords to find pages that have lots of followers or that are in a particular category to get more exposure for their spam comments and links.
Set Up Moderation Assist Today
Get it set up and monitor the activity log occasionally to track how many comments have been auto hidden and what the triggers are. You can adjust your criteria accordingly to cover the evolution of spam in the future!
If you need assistance with setting up or managing your social media profiles, give us a shout over here.