Even if you think you’ve targeted exactly the right audience, your Facebook posts and ads can still attract a lot of unwanted comments…
Whenever something “smells” even the slightest bit promotional, there will always be people who feel the urge to leave offensive comments and spam.
So it’s no surprise many Facebook page admins and advertisers start wondering…
“Can Facebook comments on posts and ads be turned off?”
The short answer is: YES, but…
While Facebook offers ways to completely turn off comments on posts in Groups, and offers ways to set who can comment on posts on your Facebook Page, they don’t offer this option for ads.
To disable Facebook ad comments, you’ll have to get a bit creative.
In this article we’ll show you how can use the moderation tools Facebook offers to page admins and advertisers, to disable comments on your Facebook posts and ads.
We’ll also show you the moderation software we’ve built specifically to remove unwanted comments on Facebook and Instagram posts, ads, stories & reels.
3 ways to turn off comments on Facebook
On Facebook there are various content types, and for each of these Facebook offers its users different ways to disable comments. We’ll discuss 4 types of content: Facebook Profiles, Facebook Groups, Facebook Pages and Facebook Ads.
Facebook profiles
Facebook started as a social platform to connect with friends and family. It then turned more and more into a platform businesses use to reach their prospects and customers.
As a result many business owners will use their private Facebook profile for staying in touch with their friends as well as for business purposes. So it’s easy to imagine situations when you might want to just disable Facebook comments on your posts.
First click on Settings & privacy, then click on Settings and then Public Posts.
Then you can set who can comment on your public posts. This is account-wide setting that you can update on individual posts as well. You can choose: Public, Friends of Friends of just Friends.
Facebook Groups
If you’re an Admin or Moderator of a Facebook Group, you can completely switch off commenting on specific posts. You can so by clicking on the 3 dots to open the actions menu and then clicking Turn off commenting. Alternatively, you can Slow down comments which will limit members to one comment every 5 minutes.
When you disable commenting on a specific Group post, that doesn’t automatically apply to all your other posts. Also, you can always change your mind by opening the same menu to Turn on commenting again for that specific post in your Facebook Group.
Facebook Pages
Many businesses will allow users to post on their Facebook Page. These will show up in the Community tab on their Facebook Page, and are actually “posts” not “comments”.
Inside your Facebook Page settings, you can choose your settings for these types of posts. When you are on your Facebook Page, click Settings and then Visitor Posts.
You can make sure that you can Review posts by other people before they are published to the Page or completely Disable posts by other people on the Page.
Again, this applies to posts not to comments.
How turn off comments on Facebook ?
There isn’t a setting to turn off comments on Facebook posts and ads like there is for Groups, Pages and your personal Facebook Profile.
Or a setting to hide all Facebook comments automatically.
To disable Facebook comments on posts or ads, you’ll have to get a bit creative.
In your Facebook Page Settings, you’ll find the Content Moderation setting that allows to input a list of specific keywords to block on Facebook. Whenever a comment is posted that contains any of the keywords on your blacklist, it will automatically be hidden.
This applies to both your posts and Facebook ads.
The recommended use of this list is to enter a list of bad words, names of competitors and things like that. But you can also enter a list of the most common words in your language, like the most common words in English, to hide most comments that you’ll receive.
Facebook requires a minimum character count of 2 characters per word, so you can’t add single letters of the alphabet to exclude any comment which includes these letters.
This use of the Content Moderation feature is the best way to turn off comments on Facebook ads without the use of any third-party software. It’s not perfect, but it does get the job done by hiding (almost) all comments. As a Facebook advertiser, you can then manually unhide the comments that you want to make publicly visible.
In general it’s better to hide instead of delete Facebook comments anyway, because deleting comments feels too much like censorship. When hiding a Facebook comment, the person who wrote it probably won’t even notice
Turn off Facebook comments ads completely
I’d like to end this article about disabling Facebook ad comments by showing you the Private mode feature inside CommentGuard, the comment moderation software we’ve built specifically for Facebook & Instagram comments (organic and paid).
Inside our software, you can enable a range of moderation filters. CommentGuard monitors your posts, ads, stories and reels in real-time and when a comment triggers any of your settings it will be automatically hidden within seconds of being posted.
The most strict setting is “Private mode”.
When enabled it will auto-hide all new comments, within seconds of being posted. From your dashboard you can then choose to like, unhide, reply, private message or delete it.