Social media is a hugely important tool for growing your business’s brand, and the last thing you want to do is expose your customers to spam. Yet we’ve all seen it: the tweet promising thousands of new followers or the Facebook post teasing a way to lose weight or earn easy money – of course only if you’ll click on a link. It’s an issue that’s not going away any time soon, and it must be handled in the right way.
The last thing we want to do is make our social media pages less open to the public, so instead we must use the settings available to us to keep spam away, and actively deal with it when it arrives. "It’s ok to delete ad spam posted to your company social pages,” says Charlie Treadwell, Director Social Marketing at Symantec. “If it continues, you can choose to ban the user posting the irrelevant content.”
Doing so is a familiar process. What do we do when we receive email spam? We report it – and we can do exactly the same thing with social media spam. On Twitter, where it’s all too common to receive links in tweets from accounts with no followers and a gobbledygook username, you can report any single tweet as spam – and you have the option to automatically block the user at the same time.
On Facebook, every post has a small cross in the top-right corner. Click that and you have a useful range of options, from simply removing or hiding the offending post to banning the user from posting any further content to your Facebook page. Depending on the content of the post you can also report it as abuse, at which point you can specifically mark it as spam for Facebook to track and prevent in the future.
These steps are very simple, and few would disagree that spam posts need to be dealt with promptly. Your social media pages are extensions of your brand, and customers may view spam is a sign that you don’t take your brand seriously. But the point of social media pages is to encourage user engagement, and doesn’t diving in and modifying content go against that?
Perhaps, but in the case of spam the rules are different. “Normally we recommend never deleting posts from people in social,” explains Treadwell, “but completely irrelevant or spam content is an exception."
It’s not going to go away, but spam can quite easily be kept under control – and your followers will appreciate the effort.