Facebook Features, pt. 3: Your Business Page Spam Filter

This week I’ve decided to do a few posts on some of the newer, or lesser known, features related to Facebook Business pages. In this installment we take a look at Facebook’s new spam filter for business pages which they began testing about three months ago.

For a few months this Summer and Fall, spam began to be a real problem for Facebook business pages. Thankfully, Facebook had the tools in place for deleting and reporting this spam. But now they’ve provided us with a new tool that acts in ways similar to a spam folder in your e-mail. The new spam filter catches potential spam and hides it until you decide what to do with it. Here’s how to find it.

Check for spam

1. Underneath the status are on your Business page, click on the word “Options“. You’ll then see a variety of different filters for your wall, with “Spam” on the far right.

2. Click on the word “Spam” and see if there is anything there.

As you can see, this particular post is clearly spam, and has thankfully been caught by Facebook. On one occasion I’ve actually seen a legitimate post caught in the spam filter. At this point you’ll have to determine what to do with the posts you find in the spam filter.

3. Hover over the area to the right of the post and you’ll see an “X”. Click on the X and you’ll be given the following options:

4. If the post is in fact Spam, your have three options.

• If the post is from a legitimate fan of your business, you should probably just click on “Remove post.”
• If it is definitely from a fake spam account, you could click on “Remove post and ban page”.
• or, I think the best option is “Report as abuse,” as it is the best way of alerting Facebook of spam accounts.

In the rare instance that you find something in the spam filter that is a legitimate wall post, just click on “Unmark as spam” and it will move the post to the wall where it belongs.

5. If you choose “Report as abuse” you will then see something like this:

Click the appropriate choice, most likely “spam or scam” and then hit submit. This will delete the post entirely from your spam filter.

A few notes regarding spam and monitoring your page

1. Be vigilant and check frequently. Mostly you want to check your wall for spam that doesn’t get caught, and check your spam filter for legitimate posts that are mistakenly caught.

2. The spam problem seems to be lessening. I actually haven’t found any spam in my various spam filters in quite some time. But that doesn’t mean spammers aren’t looking for new ways to beat the Facebook system. Of course if they do, Facebook will find new ways to stop them.

3. And here’s some food for thought: Think about what this means to you as a business, and a consumer, as you post things on other Facebook business pages. Are your posts, especially as you “tag” other pages, spammy looking? If so, they might get caught in a spam filter.

Right now the system seems to be working well, and hopefully that will be your experience as well. Any other thoughts on spam on Facebook?

Tagged as: business, E-mail filtering, facebook, Social Media, Spam