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Technology Advice for Small Businesses

Preventing profane content on FB

Facebook_May19_AAn ever increasing number of businesses, especially small to medium ones, are finding that an online presence is a necessary part of attracting and retaining customers. One of the best ways to establish an online presence is to be where your customers are, and right now this is Facebook. While Facebook is great communication tool, there is always a chance that someone could post inappropriate and profane content on your Page, impacting your corporate image. But, did you know that there is a proactive solution to this?

Proactive monitoring posted Facebook Page content

If you are an admin for your business Facebook Page, there is a good chance that you likely would prefer to be as proactive as possible when it comes to monitoring what is posted on your News Feed and Page. The best way to do this is to use Facebook’s built-in word and profanity filters.

Enabling the word filter

All Page admins have access to a word filter which can mark all posts or comments that contain words you have set as spam. You can block words by:

  1. Logging into your Facebook Page. You do need to be the admin for your account, so be sure to log in using these details.
  2. Clicking Edit Page followed by Edit Settings.
  3. Selecting Page Moderation and typing the words you want to block.
  4. Clicking on Save Changes.

When entering your blocked words, you will need to enter both the singular and plural versions because the filter works on a per-word basis. Be sure to also separate words with a comma. When you do get a post or comment that contains the blocked word, it will be sent directly to your Spam folder.

You can access this by going into your Page’s Activity Log and clicking on Spam. All spam messages will pop up, and if you would like to approve a post click on the circle with a line through it, followed by Unmark as Spam. For comments, simply hover over and click Unhide.

Enabling the profanity filter

No business wants profanity to appear on their Facebook page, it simply looks unprofessional and can harm your online brand and corporate image. Facebook has a profanity filter that can help and you can enable this to work on your Page content by:

  1. Logging into your Facebook Page. You do need to be the admin for your account, so be sure to log in using these details.
  2. Clicking Edit Page followed by Edit Settings.
  3. Selecting Profanity Filter and selecting either Medium or Strong.
  4. Clicking Save Changes.

The profanity filter works off of a list curated by Facebook which have been marked by other users as offensive or words which are commonly reported as profane and offensive.

If you are looking to learn more about using Facebook in your business, contact us today to see how we can help.