Four Ways To Prevent Unwanted Comments on your Facebook Author Page

We’ve all been there. You post about your new book on your Facebook Author page; maybe you paid to boost the post, or made an ad. And then the comments come in. Loads of scams, fake-commenting that your page is in breach of Amazon Terms. Some people decide your post is a great place to advertise their own book. Some hawk their own services. And then the trolls come along to tell you how utterly awful your book is. This is much more damaging to your campaigns than you might think.

What steps can you take as an author to prevent these comments in the first place when Facebook doesn’t let you turn off comments on your ads? Here are four ways to prevent or limit these sorts of comments on your Facebook posts for good, and prevent commenters messing up your campaigns on Facebook.

1. Delete, hide, block, filter – if you still want comments to be allowed, but just not with swearwords/profanity

Click: https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=followers_and_public_content

Go to Hide posts and comments with profanity

Turn the filter ON.

for current comments, you should either

HIDE them, by going to the comment and clicking Hide, which will leave the comment there but nobody will be able to see it

DELETE the comment, which will permanently get rid of it

BLOCK USER – this option will be given if you Hide Comment. You will also be asked if you wish to report the user who left the comment. As a moderator of several pages, I always report and block any user who leaves nasty comments. Ads without comments perform around 11% better than those with negative comments, while ads with positive comments behaved 97% better all round, according to this test by Jason at Agora Pulse.

You can also add user names here manually: https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=blocking

2. Block keywords manually via your settings – if you want to prevent comments from being made in the first place

While Facebook doesn’t allow you to turn off comments permanently, you can play the system to block all the words that will prevent comments from being posted in the first place.

Click: https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=followers_and_public_content

Go to: Hide comments containing certain words from your Page

Here is a good list to add for starters if you want to stop scammers, hawkers, and nasty commenters:

scam, breach, terms, guidelines, horrible, nasty, disgusting, bad, poor, terrible, awful, spelling, average, mistakes, editing, quality, amateur, check, look, services, website, site, link, .com, warmth, click, contact, get in touch, Admin, banned, deleted, fake, ripoff

Here is the list if you want to block almost all critical/negative/spammy comments:

the, in, is, your, that, this, them, these, it, and, so, book, horrible, nasty, scam, disgusting, bad, poor, terrible, awful, average, mistakes, quality, amateur, breach, terms, guidelines, writing, cover, editing, banned, deleted, spelling, words, author, amazon, link, check, look, services, website, site, .com, warmth, click, contact, get in touch, Admin, fake, ripoff

This will mean commenters will only be able to leave one-word comments, such as “Fantastic!”

You have to hit your “return” key to make the “save” button show up.

Adding Emojis to your block list

You can add emojis to your list by cutting and pasting this list here of the most negative ones:

😆,💩,😫,🤬,😡,😠,😤,😔,😩,😖,🥺,☹️,😒,😟,😱,😭,🤥,🤠,😿,😳,😨,🤢,🤮,👺,🤡,🫣,🥱,😾

or else you can add them manually one at a time with a return between them by clicking on the emoji symbol in the right corner:

3. Extra-wholesome commenting word list upload (without seeing the words)

If you feel you want to go further, or if you have a romance or erotica title on offer, you should download and cut and paste a whole list of bad words, available here on a .CSV document, to make your page Christian-friendly/wholesome, courtesy of Frontgate Media, although most of these will be covered by the Profanity Filter. You don’t have to read it. You can upload the file without looking at it by clicking the three dots and uploading the file here:

4. Limit access to your content for scammers working offshore

As an extra bonus, you can consider cutting out all comments from offshore scammers by limiting the countries that see your posts.

In the same box, scroll down to Country Restrictions, and add only the main English-speaking countries of the world:

Of course, you may have a book with a niche interest in a certain country, but otherwise this tool can help filter out readers that would not normally buy books in English and therefore save you money on your ads or boosted posts. This should save you time and also money, as countries that do not speak English will not be served your content anymore.