I had absolutely no intention of ever turning my blog into a tips and tricks page by any means. There are far too many blogs that do that and I was hoping to offer a bit more of a macro look at what is going on than deal with minor items. In a way, I’m doing a similar cop-out on this one but, what can I say, things have gotten busy. More than that, I was actually a bit perplexed by this one recently and actually found it fairly difficult to figure out, or find information on, what was up with a Facebook page we were managing for a client.
The main rub came when dealing with a Facebook page for a fairly prominent client we are working with. I started to notice that several of the comments were turning out in different shades of grey and the coloring was slightly darker on some posts. After some research, I found that these darker shaded posts are having been marked as spam. You can easily unmark comments as spam by clicking the marking in the top right corner of the post and choosing to reveal it or not. My favourite feature of it is that the post is still visible to page administrators and the original user. This allows those in control to see the comment, but none of the other page fans. For controlling what type of message is shown, this is an awesome (albeit justifiably sneaky) way of keeping the message positive and handling negative feedback in a discrete manner. Honestly, I wish this worked for my own Facebook profile…I might post things a bit more.
Now, I’m not the only admin on the account (you can appreciate the client likes to retain SOME control over their content 🙂 ), but I do not believe that they have been marking people as spam. As such, I’m left to believe that either Facebook itself is using some sort of algorithm to determine what is spam, Facebook admins are monitoring the page, or the page’s fans are vigilant in protecting the Facebook page. I’m sincerely hoping for the latter as that means our user engagement has succeeded beyond our expectations, but I also have an inkling that the Facebook machine is flexing it’s muscles.
With that said, I hope I’ve, at most, got you interested in the level of buzz we can create for you or your brand, and at the least, informed you on why your content comments look like grey-scale piano keys.
What does anyone else think? Is Facebook taking control? Am I crazy? Or is Denote Communications just that awesome at what we do?
My thoughts are all of the above!