If you manage a Facebook fan page, you’ve probably experienced the tricky experience of navigating through user posts. Fans of the page post like mad. Then you go back to see this strange onslaught of posts. It’s too late to delete any of them – plus, you don’t want to upset fans. There must be a better way to moderate.
Facebook pages now have a feature that allows admins to review user posts before allowing them to appear publicly. This will not only help moderate spam posts, it will also give organizations more control over what appears on these walls. But is that a good thing?
For social media marketers who demand control over their pages, this is great news. If a comment or idea strikes the marketer as inappropriate or just not useful, it will never appear on the Facebook fan page wall.
Facebook moderates what types of images appear, making sure that there aren’t any nipples. Now marketers can act more like Facebook and less like, um, social media marketers?
What about crowdsourcing? What about types of Facebook fan pages that benefit from an onslaught of bizarre reactions by users? Take @horse_ebooks‘ Facebook fan page, for example. Each tweet gets posted to Facebook, and in turn elicits strange reactions from Facebook users. To moderate a page like this would mean ruin.
To change the Facebook fan page permissions, go to Edit Page > Manage Permissions and then select “Only show posts by [your page] and friend activity on your page until reviewed by an admin.” In the Timeline Activity Log, this means that Facebook will hide posts made by other users.
The “Friend Activity” section of the Facebook fan page remains the same. This only affects posts that users make on the wall.
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