Starting a Facebook Group is easy and can be done in 5 minutes or less. But growing a Facebook Group to hundreds, and then thousands (for some, millions!) of members? That takes a lot of time and effort.
The last thing you would want is for your Facebook Group to get shut down by Facebook because someone posted content that is against the FB’s community standards.
Currently, there are growing concerns from Facebook Group Admins regarding a group’s safety from being shut down. There are rumblings around our very own community, and other groups for Facebook Group Admins as well about large groups being shut down because of posts that violate Facebook’s community standards.
As such, the topic of how to keep your Facebook Group safe has been popping up in our community, which is why I went on ahead to write this blog post to give some clarity around this topic—as well as to highlight some tips from Power Admins inside our group.
Before (or after) you read this blog, I highly encourage you to read the Community Standards from Facebook so you have a better understanding of the rules—what’s allowed and what’s not allowed.
The strategies that will be discussed here will only have some references to the community standards, but we will not be reposting the entire piece here.
Hope this helps keep your group safe!
How To Keep Your Facebook Group Safe From Being Shut Down
Keeping Your Facebook Group Safe From Bot and Dummy Accounts
The first step in protecting your Facebook Group from getting banned or shut down is to control who is accepted into your group.
Most admins know this and deploy a strict membership approval process. But others still accept people randomly, in hopes of increasing Facebook Group growth.
The best way to protect your group is to filter who gets accepted in the first place. To do that, here are a few steps that you can take:
Approve members only after checking their profile completely
- If an aspiring Facebook group member has no profile picture, that’s a huge red flag. No legitimate person in this day and age uses Facebook without a profile picture.
- If the number of friends is visible, check it as well. Someone with less than 10 friends is suspicious.
Check current posts if the account is public. Otherwise, if the account is public, you may give the benefit of the doubt if the member has a profile photo and cover image, and a decent number of friends.
Always have Member Approvals turned on
- It’s better to be safe than sorry. While having member approval turned off can lead to faster growth for your Facebook Group, it also opens up your community to bad actors and bot accounts, which can harm your group in the long run.
By being strict with your Facebook Group member approval process, you are able to protect your group at the very first stage. While this doesn’t guarantee that all members in your group will behave, you do save a lot of time and headache by weeding out bad members at the start.
P.S. For larger Facebook Groups with hundreds of thousands to millions of members, having membership approval on can be a pain. This was raised by some members of our community. For instances like this, we highly recommend turning on Post Approval (more on this later) at the very least to keep the Facebook Group safe.
Reinforce Your Facebook Group Rules Regularly
Every Facebook Group MUST have rules or guidelines. Without rules, members can do whatever they want, and that would be bad for your community’s overall health.
We recommend that you repost your Facebook Group Rules at least once a month for large groups, and once every three months for smaller groups.
You can do this faster through Convosight’s Group Guidelines post template. Feel free to explore! Otherwise, you can manually copy and paste your FB Group Rules and post it.
Always Have Keyword Alerts Turned On
Prevention is better than cure. Having keyword alerts turned on through Convosight can give you immediate info regarding what your members are posting and talking about—even in the comments section.
To date, Convosight’s Keyword Alerts feature has detected nearly 500,000 potential spam in FB Groups and fake news comments.
Set up keyword alerts and insert words that you know are negative and can be harmful. Anything related to porn and profanity should be up there. Hate, violence, and racist speech are also against Facebook’s community standards, so you can also set those up.
For a full list of Facebook’s Community Standards, read here.
To learn more about keyword alerts on Convosight and how to set it up for your group, read our blog post.
P.S. If you are not using Convosight yet, you should! Ha—kidding aside, if you aren’t using our free app for Facebook Group Admins just yet, you can also setup Facebook moderation alerts, or turn on Admin Assist and toggle on the “Keywords in Post’ criteria. Read our ultimate guide on Admin Assist for Facebook Groups for more information.
Turn On Post Approvals To Keep Facebook Group Safe From Spam
Possibly the most important advice to keep your Facebook Group safe is to have post approvals turned on.
Though the newly released Admin Assist feature can definitely help, it’s still best to have post approvals turned on so that you and your Facebook Group moderators can use your best judgement and approve or reject posts.
Now, this can definitely get tricky and time consuming the larger your group gets.
But with Facebook being strict with negative content, it will be tough if some random person posts something negative and harmful and you lose your entire group—the community you spent countless hours, sweat and tears building!
Turn on post approvals to always be on the safe side. If the workload gets tough, bring in extra help by hiring volunteer Facebook Group moderators. You can start with the most active and most passionate members of your group!
Kick Out Facebook Group Rules Violators
And last but not the least, I highly suggest that you kick out members who violate the rules. You can choose to show mercy and give warnings and 2-3 chances.
You can also choose to be strict and kick a member immediately once they violate the rules.
It’s entirely up to you how strict or lax you will be imposing the rules in your group. But if your main concern is having your Facebook Group shut down—then being strict can definitely pay off.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this quick guide can help you keep your Facebook Group safe from being shut down or banned.
There’s nothing worse that can happen for a dedicated Facebook Group Admin than losing his/her Facebook Group because some member broke the rules and posted negative content. At Convosight, we definitely don’t want that to happen to you.
We created our Facebook Group for Facebook Group Power Admins (join the Southeast Asia group here), because we want to help and support admins not just with growth and monetization, but in every aspect of their Facebook Group journey…
Our app is free and can be enjoyed by Facebook Group Admins globally. Our support group is also free to join. And whenever we can, we provide assistance with admins who have problems or lose their groups due to spam.
Join our community and utilize Convosight’s features to help keep your group safe!
Leads digital marketing and content at Convosight. I’m passionate about all things marketing and growth, e-learning, and community building. If you’re awesome and made it all the way here, could you do me a favor and share/tweet this post too? Forever grateful!