How To Prevent Spam Comments From Razing Your Brand Reputation

"Do you need up to $1,300 today?".

Duh! except for perhaps Mark Zuckerberg, who doesn't?

Unfortunately, this question isn't asked by a friend; instead, messages like these appear as spam comments on many ads.

In earlier days, spam used to favor email as it was the primary communication tool. Email IDs were relatively easier to harvest via chat rooms, websites, or customer lists.

Gradually, email filters became more sophisticated and more effectively decreased spam from clogging and disturbing the inbox.

After that, spammers have moved onto a new target: Social networks!

What Are We Dealing With

Spam comments.

A spam comment is any inappropriate or unwelcome comment that's pushed out in a large number. In general, spam involves unwanted product advertisements or irrelevant backlinks (an attempt to get the linked website higher in SEO results). It can sometimes be more sinister things like scams or malware downloads. Scams are typically characterized by the presence of replies that are irrelevant to the post.

Comment spam is also called a spomment, a portmanteau of the words 'spam' and 'comment.'

How To Identify A Spam Comment

So how can you tell which comments are legitimate and which ones are spam?

This can be tricky at times, but you can do your best by keeping your eyes open (not just literally, but you know what I mean).

Fake accounts are critical to social spamming: To gain credibility, the fake accounts will try to become 'friends' (not so friendly though) or follow verified accounts, e.g., areas of your interest or public figures, with the hope that these accounts befriend or follow them back. If any genuine account befriends or follows back a fake account, it legitimizes the account and enables it to carry out spam activities.

Keep an eye on the comments and be suspicious for any of the below

• Commenter's ID looks fake
• The email ID doesn't look legitimate
• Comment contains a weird link, or the website URL is bad
• The comment itself is generic and could apply to any post or topic

Why Are Spam Comments Bad For Your Brand Reputation

While spam comments are irritating, it is essential to spend a little time monitoring them. To increase comments on their posts, some brands may approve all their comments regardless if they are spam or not. This is a wrong move. Why?

Spams can tarnish your brand, clutter your comments, and damage your credibility.

Lack Of Moderation Demonstrates Apathy And Indifference

Your followers' safety and security are essential factors to pay attention to. If your comment section is littered with spam comments, it shows a lack of maintenance and care.

Would you want to live in an environment where no one maintains their surroundings and the streets or neighborhood are littered with trash? This is the kind of impression that spam comments give to your followers about your brand.

Spam Comments Affect Your Trust And Authority

In addition to security and safety, trust and authority are also important factors for staying in the game. Taking the time to moderate your ad comments and ensure your content is safe for visitors says - you care, which instills trust, which goes a long way in establishing yourself as an authority and showcases you as a trustworthy brand.

Look at the example below how people are complaining about spams on comments to Facebook.

Source: Facebook

Ignoring spams is not the best move for your brand.

So now that we have identified the problem, let us go ahead and look at the solution.

How To Deal With Spam Comments On Ads

There are two ways to deal with spam on your Facebook and Instagram ads.

1. Facebook ads manager
2. Social media management tool

1. Managing Spams Using Facebook Ads Manager

Check out the image below showing how to manage comments on an Instagram ad using Facebook's ads manager.

Source: Facebook

While Facebook offers to delete a comment option, the problem is when as a brand, you receive

• Many spam comments at the time
• Spam comments for multiple ad campaigns

2. Managing Spams Using Social Media Management Tool

When brand profiles on social media get a ton of engagement, they are easily targeted by spammers. These spammers use your reach and your comment section to steal the audience's attention. Usually, spammers post comments with links to their products or websites that have nothing to do with your brand or content.

Having a lot of spam on your social media content can hamper user engagement and experience. Although each social network provides some sort of spam management features, they might not work as expected. On the other hand, Statusbrew provides a completely automated spam management solution.

If your social media management tool has a rule engine like Statusbrew, you can delete or prevent comments with particular words from ever appearing on your Facebook and Instagram organic or paid posts.

Add rules to hide and delete spam comments automatically.

So if you encounter any comment that turned out to be spam, you can use Statusbrew's custom rule engine for:

1. All Round Profanity Removal

As a brand, you would want to create a safe space for your brand audience to engage with your content and amongst one another. Profane comments can put off a lot of potential customers and hamper your brand image.

2. Network-Specific Spam Action

Depending on your brand industry's social network, you can be targeted by various kinds of spam on different networks. Hence you can create network-specific rules to manage spam.

3. Tagging Your Spam

If you want to make sure that these rules are working correctly and want to track the spam you are getting on social media, you can tag your spam.

4. Closing Spam Conversation

Over time, you would have a lot of conversations to deal with in Engage. Having a clear inbox provides a good workflow. It is a good practice to add the close conversation action to your spam rules to keep your inbox clutter-free.

5. Retrospection & Re-evaluation

There are mainly two things you should consider during retrospection:

• See if any new spam message needs attention. Modify your rules to add the new spam keywords if there are any.

• Go through the hidden conversations to see if there are any non-spam conversations on the list. If so, unhide those comments and tweak your keyword list to correct the working of your spam management rule.

Conclusion

Trust your intuitions!
If it looks anything like spam, smells like spam, tastes like spam, it's probably spam (OK, maybe not tastes like spam). With all the proper filters set up, things will get through, and spam comment management is something you'll want to stay on top of.

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Tags

• Comment Management
• Facebook
• Instagram