If you administer a Facebook page with a significant number of likes, you will unfortunately become the target of spammers that will target your page with all kinds of advertisements. Facebook does a fairly good job of detecting these ads and banning the fake accounts responsible, but some spam attacks can go on for several days before being stopped.
One spam ad that we have been seeing a lot of recently looks like this:
The scamsters can create fake Facebook accounts much quicker than you’re able to delete their ads, and most Facebook pages don’t have the resources to monitor their pages 24/7. So what is the best way to prevent these advertisements?
One very efficient method that we have found is to use the moderation blocklist, which can be found under Edit Page – Manage Permissions:
As you can see, we have added “lose weight” to the list of moderated words. Comments including “lose weight” will seldom if ever be relevant on our fashion related Facebook pages. Since most of the spam ads seem to contain almost identical language, finding similar wording in the ads and adding that to the blocklist can dramatically reduce the amount of Facebook spam that you see.
Please note that comments made using words in the blocklist will still be visible to the person commenting and his/her friends. However, they will not be visible to anyone else. Page administrators though have the ability to unhide comments. In other words, it’s good to check once in a while that you are not blocking false positives.