Quick Tip for Fighting Facebook Page Spammers

If you have a Facebook page that is even slightly successful, you’re probably getting spammers and scammers commenting on your posts. They are attracted to comments on posts like flies to honey.

I’ve encountered two types of toxic comments so far –

1. Spammers that share links to their pages, groups or products
2. Scammers that leech onto other commenters with fake compliments and invitations to connect on Facebook. They often target women, so we call them the “American” widowers.

When they first appeared on our pages, my team and I began playing a neverending game of whack-a-scammer. We would delete each comment, making sure to ban that profile. Of course, it’s probably bots, or offshore operators who create these profiles en masse, so new ones kept popping up.

It was annoying and time-consuming for our team. Fortunately, I came across this feature in the Facebook Page admin panel that pretty much solved the problem.

Turns out, you can moderate comments to prevent them from showing up in the first place. It’s a surprisingly robust and easy to use tool, only it’s “buried” in the overall clunky interface, so many page owners never turn it on.

Here’s a super quick step-by-step on how to rid your page of spammers.

1. Switch your profile to the page profile and go to your page.

2. Under the “Manage Page” menu on the left, click where it says “Professional Dashboard”

3. Once there, click where it says “Moderation Assist”

4. The Moderation Assist menu offers you multiple criteria for filtering out comments. The default one you might see is to filter out people who don’t have friends. I turn that one off because some legitimate comments come from accounts with no friends, whereas the spam/scam accounts make sure to add a bunch of fake friends to theirs.

Instead, I filter comments that have a link in them, or certain words. The link criterion helps weed out spammers who are there to share links to their sites, groups, or products. The keywords filter is the one we use to fight off the scammers.

5. You can further edit the keywords filter by hitting that “edit” icon and then clicking where it says “Comment has certain keywords”.

6. This is where you can choose which words will trigger the filter. You can see our list of words here. They are intended to keep scammers at bay, as they typically try to convince people to connect with them. You could adjust these words any way you like, to handle your type of spammers, scammers, or just problem users.

Don’t forget to save your list of words, and that’s it! You’re done!

We found this tool to be very effective at keeping the pages clean. I hope it works for you too! If you figure out any great filter words to use there, leave a comment here and share them with us. I’m hoping we can work as a community to fight spammers and scammers and provide a better experience for our users.