#018 When Is It Okay To Ban Someone From Your Page?

Social media tends to get a bad wrap for being the hotbed of trolling and that anonymous courage from customers or former employees who are willing to say ANYTHING in reviews, comments, or posts to trash organizations. In this episode, Beth Trejo, CEO, and Kelsey Martin, COO, talk about when it is okay to ban someone from your page, delete comments, hide comments, and other monitoring actions. We know you care about your organization, but always take a step back and think about how you’d handle this at an event. Beth and Kelsey are sharing the steps they take to adjust their perspective and put a plan of action together in this episode.

Biggest Takeaways From This Episode

Banning Someone on Facebook

What does banning mean? Facebook recommends banning someone who continually publishes spam on your page. The user will NOT get a notification that you have banned them. But, trust us, they will be able to see that their functions have been limited on your page. Think of this as the Facebook time out.

Banning someone will, more often than not, make the situation more dramatic. So be prepared to handle the aftermath.

Always have someone else look at the comment or page to determine whether or not this warrants evaluating for banning. We're very tied to our accounts, and we're extremely passionate. Breathe and get a third party opinion.

Log EVERYTHING. Screenshot it, document your timeline. Document, Document, Document.

A banned person can't: Post to your page, like or comment your posts, or send your page a private message.

A banned person can still: Share content from your page to other places on Facebook.

Can I unban someone who was previously banned? Yes! You can ban and unban a user at any given time.

When to ban

When people are bullying
When visitors are using profanity in ways that are beyond what you're comfortable with
Hate speech
Violating HIPAA
Repeat offenders and are adding only negative value
Someone posting inappropriate photos or crossing into a criminal violation

When you should not ban

If someone says something that you don't agree with or something that offended you. It may just feel personal but not appropriate to ban them.
If you can calm and solve the customer's issue offline. Always attempt to connect offline to come to a resolution.

Blocking Someone on Facebook

This is what it's called when you ban someone on your personal account. Pages can not block people from Facebook, only ban them.

Deleting Comments

What is does “deleting a comment” do? Deleting a comment will erase that comment. No one will be able to see it, including you. The user will know that the comment has been deleted if they try to view it again. The user will NOT get a notification that you have deleted their comment. But, trust us, they will be able to see that their functions have been limited on your page.

Who can still see the comment? No one can see deleted comments.

If you hide a comment, the comment will be hidden from everyone except the person that posted it and their friends. They won't know that the comment is hidden.

When should you delete a comment? If you're doing an ad and it is paid for, you have the ability to delete a comment. If it's not on your timeline, most people won't be able to go back and find that post.

Negative comments on an ad after you try to resolve the issue
Negative feedback on an ad after you try to resolve the issue
A comment where someone just didn't really understand that it was an ad. "Hi joe, how are the kids?"
If you're willing and ready to deal with the aftermath of deleting the comment, go ahead!

Remove Someone From Liking Our Page

What does it mean to remove someone from liking your page? This is when you remove someone from liking the page, but they still have the opportunity to use all of the same functions and visibility as someone who does like your page.

When would you remove someone from liking your page? We suggest using this feature for someone who you don't want to follow the content from your page in the timeline or newsfeed anymore. If someone comments and says, "I don't want to see this anymore," I would recommend removing them from liking the page.

The visitor may not see content as much. Keep in mind that Facebook pages are public; they can still go to your timeline, interact, and see your content.

The Ultimate Deciding Factor: To Ban, Delete, Or Hide

Imagine you're at a town hall, and this person walks into the room and is disruptive and is a jerk, would you walk up to them and ask them to leave? How would you approach that situation, knowing all eyes are on your reaction. Is this just loud noise, or is this beyond disruption? If you don't have the courage to walk up to this person in a room and ask them to leave, then I'd second guess banning, deleting the comments, or taking any moderating action to their posts. If you believe what you're doing is right, then you probably pass the test!

Transcript

This text below is a straight-up audio transcript of the episode. In our humble opinion, we think the audio podcast sounds much better in its original form. We have not edited the transcription below so there are indeed some grammar errors (some quite funny, in-fact).

Welcome back to another episode of Generation Social Media. I am Beth Trejo CEO of Chatterkick. I have Kelsey Martin, our COO and she's done all the things that Chatterkick. She's been here for eight years. And um, we are going to talk today about banning people specifically from Facebook. We have uh, this question asked at speaking events and we wanted to kind of give you some insight on what our take is on this subject as well as what we've seen happen. I feel like both ways, this is a question that when people run up to you or like this is the, if you ever get a question asked on the street, yeah. It's like someone ran up to you and be like, I was really annoying person or I have this person. Like when is it okay to ban someone from my page?

And like what is the appropriate like am I, I'm obviously sensitive to this. Like, is it okay to ban them or not? Well, let's first start by just laying some of the vocab out on the table because I think there's a lot of words people use like banning and blocking and deleting comments and hiding comments. Let's, why don't you just kind of tell people what the difference is between banning, blocking, hiding comments and deleting. Okay, so banning is for business pages. What was really interesting, like I always go and do more research and like look up what Facebook stands on this. And I didn't expect to find anything other than like the instructions on how to ban, but they actually have a recommendation on when to ban. So Facebook actually recommends banning people who continually publish spam on your page. When you ban someone from your page, they'll still be able to share content from your page to other places on Facebook.

So that's something that's really important to know. Like you're not gonna remove your account from their entire existence. They can still share content from your page to other places, but they'll no longer be able to publish content to your page. They will not be able to like or comment on any of your pages posts and they won't be able to message your page directly. So it doesn't delete you from all existence on Facebook, but it does add a barrier for them interacting with you in that way. But you can ban and unbanned someone at any given time. Like you can go back and say you're no longer in our, in timeout here on this page. Like we welcome your positivity back on the page. Blocking is not something that you can do as a page, but that is what it's called on a personal page.

So if you have a frenemy or whatever, people are blocking people for days. That's on your personal page. You also asked about deleting comments. You can delete and hide comments, but we're going to get into when that's an inappropriate thing to do and when it's not. A lot of the times when you, if you hide a comment, that person and their friends can still see it. And so it gets to be this strategy that you're kind of adding fuel to the fire a lot of the times that everybody else can see it, but they are the visitor is very aware that you're hiding their stuff. It doesn't give them a notification. Same thing with banning. It doesn't say like Chatterkick has banned you from their page. It's just a secret move and all of a sudden not be able to do some of the things that they were able to do before.

The other thing that no one asks asks about, because I don't know when you would really need this, but it is a feature, but you can, I guess I do have a scenario for this one, but you can have the option to remove someone who likes your page at any given time, too. So you can basically just say they're no longer liking our page. It just removes them from getting things in their in their newsfeed organically as a like on their page. This is a good option for people who you don't want following your page posts on their newsfeed. In the newsfeed of their friends, but pages are a public space so they can still see the content if they search you out, if they search you out and they go look for it. But I also just like knowing the algorithm, if someone doesn't like your page but they're still engaging with all your posts, like they're going to see your content anyways.

So I think the only strategy and the only time that I would really use like removing someone from your page and we see this on ads is if somebody comments like, I don't want to see your stuff anymore, then I would remove them from liking the page. Right? Cause most users don't really understand how Facebook works. And a lot of business owners are still trying to figure that out. It is still the case that if you have a thousand people that like your page, so they have hit the like button and they like your page does not mean a thousand people are going to see your content every single time. Right. Same thing with your personal accounts. And so I think that's just an important reminder for people. I don't have the reason why, but it just, it's not the case. So that's kind of the Facebook verbiage.

Like where do you feel like Beth, like where is your "to ban and not to ban?" Like where's the line? If you could, I think you said timeout. It's a perfect example. I have young kids and it is kind of that when they need a time out, right? It's when somebody is coming to your page and they're either bullying, they're using profanity in ways that you're not comfortable with. If they are hate speech, violating, violating HIPAA, um, if you're in healthcare. So I think there's some very obvious things that people can ban them for. I think where I would be very cautious is if they just say something that you don't agree with, you're just offended by, or you're offended by it. A lot of times what happens is a angry customer or a former employee will go on your page and they will leave a bad review or they'll leave a comment on your, your posts and that kind of stuff is just, they're angry.

And if you ban them in the moment, they'll somehow figure it out and they're going to go on their personal account and smack like trash your business. And it just becomes more dramatic than it really needs to be. A lot of the times the best case scenario is just try to pacify and calm, like take it offline phone call. Like, just give them a second to cool down before you respond on that scenario. Or sometimes respond immediately and try to get them on the phone. But, so you're saying when you read reviews or comments or whatever it is, there's a lot of the times there is a little bit of legitimacy. Like I, you know, I've moderated a lot of pages and there are some crazy stories out there and you know, the first response that we get from business owners is they're like, well, that's just not true.

That's a lie. We got to get rid of this. And it's like, okay, well they're probably embellishing a lot. They're heated. They're, if they're posting to social, it's not because they're usually in a neutral space. They're either really excited or really upset. But you do need to have that conversation of the customer service, like in real life, not just online of like, like you said, trying to get them on the phone and talk to them in person, take care of it. But what happens if you can't, if there's no rationale there, either way, everybody's just hot. Everybody's just mad and you, you can't seem to come to a resolution. When you make that decision to ban somebody, like you said with your kids, if you, if you're going to take someone and put them in timeout... I know your kids and they're sweet angels, but I'm guessing that when you say go to your room, time out, they're not like, okay, right, no, no fire at that point.

But what that's going to happen is it's going to bleed over. Like, this is a serious, I guess in real life this is not right. Right. But you're taking hot button, like you're taking the option for somebody to use their voice associated with your business and you're removing that. So you know that people go up in arms about that, about no first amendment, blah blah blah, not blah, blah blah, that really isn't fair. But you know what I mean? They'll get into the point of, you know... The truth seekers. And we see these people that just really feel the need to voice their opinions at all times. Now I think repeat offenders or people that are not adding any value or just a lot of negativity. Sometimes it makes sense to ban. And I think, again, a lot of this stuff. But Like negativity as in like towards your brand and towards your business or does it have to get to like they're calling out specific people in your business?

I mean, yeah, that I would, it all feels bad. So I'm just trying like how do we help businesses discern whether this is someone who's just temporarily angry or somebody who is trying to defame or whatever it is to your business. Like I feel like when I see our clients or you know people in the community who reach out to me and they're sending me screenshots like, Oh my God, what do I do with this? You know, I'm reading it as a completely third party so I'm not very sensitive to whatever the situation is. But they know like they just commented about Linda and Linda is going through cancer and she's the sweetest person in the world. And like I also love Linda. I don't know her, but I'm also not that like I'm not privy to that information and neither probably is this person.

But is that like we love Linda, [so] we're banning this person or when does it get to that point? I mean, I don't think that I have any direct answers for that, but I do think that I would have someone else look at your account like not your coworker, someone who else isn't in there. And just say like go through our posts. Is there anything that you notice? Don't ask them to ho see if you can tell if this guy's really saying if I should ban him. But most of the time the stories that we tell in our heads are probably more dramatic than what other people read it, which is what you were saying. And I think, it's also the case is if you get zero interaction, except for this one person who is really angry and really upset, that may be a different play because that's the only interaction you're getting.

And so I think there's a larger issue at play there if that's the only interaction you're getting. But I would consider banning someone at that point if they're just constantly negative. And you know, it's kind of like in a town hall meeting, if you have that guy that's like always a jerk, just if you'd ask him to leave. Okay. So that's, that's actually a really good way to decide banning or not, right? We're all in a room together. Is this person just like the guy there that's just like, well he's always going to say something and it's really, it's just loud. Right? Or is this completely disruptive to everybody else? Right. And you'd ask them to leave and I think that is, if you don't have the courage to go up to someone and ask them to leave the room, then like just like that you should not do it on Facebook because it's the same concept like that it takes courage.

It takes a little bit of like, I believe what I'm doing is right and if you don't think you could go up to someone face to face and do the same thing, I think that's probably where that should fall on social. Fair enough. I didn't even think about that. But you're also going to have like, did you know that that page banned Steve, like that's crazy. And they, it happens all the time. Especially if it's political or you're a business with a lot of customers or you have a big reach. Oh yeah, we see that happen all the time. It's like, well everybody, this page banned me. They aren't letting me use my voice and then they make this big hooplah about and go leave bad reviews on their Google page. It is something to think about because we have seen that multiple times of you know, a situation where, you know, it did cross the line and they were posting pictures of employees or they were, it just was going beyond like, you know, almost into like a criminal scenario.

And so we did make that option, choose that option to ban. We documented everything screen save it so that, you know, if this does become a bigger issue or you never know what's going to happen after the fact that we know exactly the timeline of what happened when it happened. These were all the actions that we took. Like this is, we even called these guys three times, like we logged everything. But then after the fact they did that same exact thing of like these guys banned me go leave bad reviews and their family did. Like we started getting reviews from their cousins and in those situations, like you just have to be ready to deal with the crisis mode and repercussions of that. But the reality is is they had like seven cousins, they were bad reviews and all the bad reviews had the same last name.

And they all said the same thing. And I think you talk about this in a couple of other episodes, people will read into that and understand like, okay, this is just this person and their families, but like on the bad review side and understand that they're not legitimate. But I think that that is a real fear for businesses like starting that firestorm. Yeah. And I think it, it probably is validated. I mean, people, they forget really quickly, but they also get passionate really quickly when they don't have to be face to face. Right. There is a little bit of a level of, um, I think gumption when you don't have to like actually have someone in front of you and to say something mean. I think the other scenario is don't forget if this is an ad, a paid ad and they're commenting on the ad, totally different strategy, nice transition.

That's where I was going next. Because that is not something I would recommend banning someone for commenting on an ad, um, because it's, you can shut the ads off and the ads don't live forever so you, okay. So that kind of walks into the deleting comments, hiding comments. I think one of the safe spaces to delete a comment, totally warranted. If you're doing an ad and it's paid for, you actually have the ability to delete a comment. If it's not on the, if it's not on your actual timeline, nobody can go back and find that ad anyways unless you're super savvy in the Facebook world. But I think it's okay to delete comments, negative comments, negative feedback on an ad. Like you don't even have to ask any questions. This is a paid for scenario. Like unless, although we have some bad... to deal with them, you still need to deal with them.

And we have seen backlash on that. Again, people don't know how it works. They don't know how Facebook works. And so if it's deleting comments and it's a already fueled, whether it's political or there's a hot button issue, it has led to more like people coming and being like "they're deleting my comments." They're deleting my comments. So there is some things to watch for on that. But if there was one negative posts or even just something a little bit weird, they were like, what is going on here? Why did they say this on this ad? Like hi, hi Joe. Tell mom I said hi. Like real. That's real. You can just hide that one. I would hide it or you can delete those kinds I have. Okay. We ran, we Chatterkick for ourselves, like doesn't really do ads which blows people's minds sometime like we maybe spent $1,000 in advertising in the over the last eight years.

But I did run a campaign, like a really small campaign, I think it was like $50 or a $100 a couple of months ago. And we targeted people who are a little bit more savvy in this space. And so one of the comments that we got on one of our ads was like "a traffic campaign, Huh? Nice." And I was kind of looking at it and I just was like, you know, the response to this could go either way. I'm kind of a like, let's keep going on this conversation. And like, yeah, what do you think about it Joe? But, I actually decided to delete it because I felt like I didn't know where this guy was coming from and it was an ad that was getting a lot of traction otherwise. So I ended up deleting it. He didn't say anything after that, but I just made that decision to do that.

And just because I didn't like where he was maybe going with it. That you didn't want to, you didn't want to poke the bear? No. Sometimes I will. I definitely will, especially on behalf of the brand. Like I'll, we have reasons for everything that we're doing. And it was strategic, it wasn't, you know, whatever. But anyways, I did decide to delete that comment and I think it's just I took into consideration that he's going to go post that on our page and you know, say these guys don't know what they're doing, but I did it anyways. I think there's a lot, the more that you do this stuff, the more confident you get in terms of like, this makes sense. I have a reason why I'm doing it. I think a lot of businesses are just trying to figure out what do I say? How do I say it?

How do I get to all these messages? What, what do we do with this guy that we know locally? You know that a lot of that, if you're a small business, you probably know that person right or their family. We keep saying guy per men. It could be a gal. But most of the cases you, it's hard to do it when you know somebody. Yeah, definitely. But again, they're not going to get a notification so don't have to worry as much about that. Okay. I really love the, to think about it if you were standing a room together, like would you ask them to leave your event or would you not ask them to leave your event? That's a really good way just for the technical side of things, how to ban someone. You can actually ban them like in the comment as you hover over their name or you can go to your page > page settings.

And then there's like a tab that says it's called "people and other pages" and that has a list of people that you have banned or you can ban directly in that section. So if you are someone who has just taken over a page or hasn't been the longstanding owner or manager of a page, go see if anybody is banned on your page now and if you're willing to let them come back to the party or not, try to get this scenario of what's going on with that. Okay. So I have a, anything else you want to add before I jump into this user? Nope. What are we calling them? Time. Time spent user. Okay. So this one was submitted via Facebook over, this was a couple of months ago. So this timeline has changed a little bit, but this is a female in her mid forties who is in the rural telecom space.

Um, but she did want me to know that she also shares her phone with a 10 year old. So her time is skewed a little bit, but she starred the ones that is not her. So this is a really interesting one cause it's kind of a profile of two different people. So this is time of like the last seven days when I got this, Facebook was still number one by far. There was like 10 hours on Facebook and then it was messages, Safari, and then messenger. I don't know if we've seen that in the top two platforms yet. Um, and then Snapchat, which had a star next to it. Google.com that was like, that specific one came up that had a star next to it. And then the other one that was in the top was like, uh, that app Lumosity, that like brain game app.

That was in the top. And that also had a star by it. So like the platforms are really Facebook messenger, Snapchat, and then the Lumosity is like a game, but that's how these pair. So Kelsey's looking at a screenshot of, of someone's phone usage by app. So that's right. Just as a reminder, we do that at the end of each of these podcasts. And really that's one of the reasons why we started this podcast was to talk about different generations and how they're using social media. So I think this one's really interesting because again, two generations, it's a young person and it is, you know, someone who is probably, well obviously working and managing a family. And, um, I think the thing that I'm a little surprised at is that there's no Instagram. Yeah. Not at all. But obviously this person monitors phone use, right, because they're sharing device.

Yeah. So if that's just an in-house rule of no Instagram, then there's no Instagram. Yeah. I, I love Instagram. I was having this conversation with one of my friends the other day about it. And I think that, in order to really see the value of some of these platforms, you need to make sure that you're like following the right people. And I'm not saying that the wrong people will ruin any of these platforms. But I think, you know, Facebook is pretty obvious. You follow your friends and family. Like that's most of the time what we see. Instagram though, I think some people follow their close connections and kind of use it as a second Facebook and other people follow brands or fashion or cars or topics, humor accounts or humor or you know, pop culture and celebrities. So I think it's just really interesting the way that people are using it.

The other one I think is interesting. So the star by it means that her, that's her child. Yes. 10 year old using Snapchat. That's interesting as well because I do see a lot of people in multiple demographics who Snapchat, but they're just using it very differently. A lot of kids. Why aren't people talking about Snapchat anymore? I don't know, I feel like it is kind of quieted down a little bit because of the rise in popularity of TikTok just capturing a lot of people's attention right now. Instagram is just a huge player in the mix. They're just really killing it right now. And Facebook is just has so many people that they have a real stronghold as well. And LinkedIn, same, but Snapchat has kind of quieted down in terms of how people are talking about it. Um, I still think it's a very popular messaging app for a lot of like high schoolers and young people.

They don't text, they'll just snap each other in some circles. But, I think that the fact that you can get those filters on other accounts is also really probably a struggle for Snapchat because they were the only ones you could get the augmented reality kind of the. Do you think it's the argument of like are the other platforms doing the filters better or is it just the overall platform experience is better? So people are like, these filters aren't good enough, but there are like, they're not great. They're not as good as Snapchat, but they're good enough. Like what do you think the draw is? I don't know. I think that a lot of people gravitated to Snapchat because of the fact that I didn't live forever and a lot of these other platforms have kind of integrated that. And so now you don't even have to leave Instagram to watch your TV, play with your filters.

Search hashtags and send people dissolvable messages. Like it's all within the app. And so I think that kind of takes away that one friction point of like, okay, now I've got to open another app. I already just talked to these same people. I never really got into Snapchat. But your family did. Do you guys still snap? Yeah, I definitely checked Snapchat once, two to three times a day. That's less than what it used to be. No, I feel like we looked at your phone use like back in the day. I do. I remember really like, I liked the subscriptions on Snapchat. Like I liked a lot of those. Like they're real trashy, but um, you know, it's different articles and entertainment. I recently not valid news by any means. You're like coming in with all the facts are just more than the trash, 100% like celebrity gossip.

But I do enjoy it. News is news. I stay up to date. I recently got, you know, we have a Snapchat rep and I, they sent me a bunch of docs cause I had a conversation with them of like, you know, kind of, it's a local thing, regional thing, but it's like hard, it's hard to get businesses to, to do ads on Snapchat and you know, we see the value but those trends in these conversations are, they're a tough sell. And so they sent me like every deck, every one cheater that they have like here, use this, like give this. And so I recently got just like reacclimated with Snapchat and some of the features, they've come a long way in tracking. Um, they have like swipe to call now for certain businesses and certain ad platforms. So I definitely wouldn't, you know, put that platform on a shelf.

I think using it as a business is really challenging. If you're going to go the organic strategy and like snap, like actually post consistently. But the ad platform is like an untapped like golden scenario that people are just not even talking about. It's cheap. The you can reach a ton of people locally, regionally. And the features are like they're really building in the features. Plus they, a lot of your, well you shouldn't make content that looks like ads, but you make things that look like you made them in Snapchat. They can be really a cheap strategy to make low barrier to entry and they do so well. Yeah, I mean just putting your face in there and telling people about your latest products. Selfie version. Yeah. It's so easy. And I do think that that works and there isn't a lot of local businesses on it. So it's a really great opportunity. And again, people are always worried that they can't reach the right people. Well, if you have ads, you just pick your age. If you're not trying to reach 20 year olds, just pick the 40 year old. I mean, it is what it is, and I think it's, you don't have to worry about that when you're targeting. Right. All right. Well, cool. That's the episode.

Social MediaChatterkickMarch 24, 2020social media tip, Facebook, Moderation