How to Block Spam Comments on Facebook Posts

Trí Huỳnh

Feb 7, 2023

2 min read

When running online marketing, businesses often face spam comments. This can seriously affect their marketing campaigns. Ad spend goes to waste and ads reach the wrong customers.

Optimus, an agency offering digital marketing services, has faced the same situation and spent a great deal of time finding ways to address these problems. Here are a few lessons from Optimus that you can consider and apply to your own business.

Causes

To find a solution, we first need to understand what causes spam comments. The main cause is:

Spam comments occur when ads reach fake accounts in the target audience, or when automated tools such as comment-seeding bots affect the ads.

Solutions

According to Facebook's statistics, it removed 200 million fake user accounts and 734 million spam interactions in Q2 2022.

These numbers give us an idea of how Facebook audiences are not made up entirely of real users. A fairly significant share consists of fake users.

We therefore need to understand how Facebook works and how real users behave so we can gradually exclude these fake audiences.

Some approaches:

Exclude the following audiences (guidance from Facebook support):
- Users who have been using a new mobile device for less than 1 month or for 1–3 months
- Users who have made payments on Facebook Ads for fewer than 90 days
- New Page Admins or admins of competitors in the same industry
- Users who have played games on Canva for fewer than 30 days
Exclude audiences with a high spam-comment rate by analyzing data by:
- Device, operating system
- Age, gender
- Geographic location
- Placement (apps and Audience Network are often major sources of spam)
Set up filters to automatically hide or restrict spam content on your Facebook Page: Optimus will write a separate guide on this.
Regularly report accounts spamming your ads to Facebook.
Change the audience or revise the post's content and banner.
Switching to objectives such as Conversions or Inbox can also reduce fake users. Engagement ads are frequently affected by fake users.

These solutions can help advertisers reduce spam comments from fake users to some extent.

If you would rather have someone handle these problems, consider Optimus's Facebook advertising services. We continue to research and apply new ways to reduce spam comments for our customers.