Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to approve Facebook comments before they're posted publicly?
If you’re responsible for social media management, this will often include the moderation of comments. Liking positive comments, replying to questions, but also removing spam and negativity or banning users.
The biggest challenge with comment moderation on Facebook is that it is a 24/7 task, that never ends.
Because comments that are posted on your page posts or ads are instantly visible after posting, you need to always be on guard. The moment you’re notified of a new comment you should check it and act on it.
This is what makes Facebook comment moderation a much more demanding task than for example moderation of comments on a WordPress blog (where you can set that new comments are only posted after your review & approval). This leaves many wondering…
Can’t I review and approve Facebook comments before they’re posted?
Yes, and no.
In this article we’ll show how you can review posts on your Facebook page before they’re published. And we’ll also show you how our comment moderation software allows you to approve Facebook comments before they’re made publicly visible on your posts and ads.
Reviewing posts before they are published on your Facebook business page
Let’s start with the most straightforward setting, that’s natively available in Facebook.
Inside your Facebook page settings, you’ll find the Visitor Posts setting. Here you can choose to completely disable the ability for people to post on your page. If you do want to allow your community to post to your page, it’s highly recommended to check the option to Review posts by other people before they are published to the page.
When checking this option, posts that people write on your page will be available for review in your activity log. There you can approve them before they are posted publicly.
Do note that posts that are not approved (yet) may already appear in search, the news feeds and other places on Facebook. So it’s not perfect, but at least it can help you limit the visibility of unwanted posts.
I know, “posts” aren’t the same thing as “comments” for which Facebook doesn’t offer such a checkbox.
To help page admins and advertisers moderate unwanted comments, they just offer two features:
Facebook's profanity filter that just works in English and doesn’t understand “internet slang”.
Facebook's page moderation list to hide Facebook comments with certain words, phrases and emojis.
Approve Facebook comments on posts and ads
The observation that Facebook itself offers hardly any possibilities to proactively moderate comments, gave us the initial idea for CommentGuard our comment moderation software for Facebook & Instagram.
We wanted to be able to hide unwanted comments within seconds of being posted, then review all comments on our posts and ads in a dashboard and like or reply if needed.
The key for us was to hide fast, and unhide manually after our review and approval.
Here's how it works:
First you’ll connect your Facebook account. Then you’ll select your Facebook Pages and Instagram Business Accounts that you would like to be moderated.
And finally you’ll enable the moderation settings of your choice.
- Hide toxicity (rude, disrespectful, abusive or unreasonable comments)
- Hide profanity
- Hide URL's
- Hide images and GIFs
- Hide emojis (all or specifically selected ones)
- Hide blacklisted keywords
- Hide all comments
CommentGuard will monitor your posts and ads 24/7 and automatically hide comments for you if they trigger any of your enabled moderation settings.
So you can choose your moderation style: auto-hide all new comments to manually review them or let our AI intelligently filter out offensive, inapproriate and spammy comments.
In both cases all comments will show up in your dashboard for your review where you can like, hide, unhide, delete, ban, reply or private message, all in one place.
Approve all Facebook comments before posting
When the "Hide all comments" setting is enabled, CommentGuard will automatically hide all new comments on all your posts & ads in real-time.
This will allow you to review and approve all Facebook comments before they're posted.
I know that's not entirely true, because a hidden Facebook comment is still there but while it's hidden it will only be visible to the person who wrote it and his/her friends.
But it heavily limits the visibility of comments in the same way as Review posts by other people before they are published to the page.
After you've reviewed the your comments in CommentGuard and approve, you can unhide them again on Facebook to extend the visibility beyond just the comment author and his or her friends.
Would you like to be able to hide all comments and make them public only after your approval?
Sign up for our free trial, no credit card required.