THE 5 FACEBOOK POSTS YOU SHOULD DELETE
By: Hannah Rhoad

Over the years Facebook has become more popular. With parents, aunts and uncles, and even grandparents on Facebook, pages are being monitored more now than ever, and the same goes for businesses. According to prdaily.com there are five posts that businesses should delete from their walls.

Not everyone is going to love the brand, and may see the Facebook page as a public forum to put down the business. If this happens, as the business there are two options: Engage the person or ignore him or her. Only in special cases and as last-resort scenarios does the business want to delete a comment, without proper cause.

Here are a few guidelines for when it is necessary to delete posts on your businesses page:

1) If the post is depicting some illegal action.
 Any time someone posts a photo of an illegal activity on the page, the business should delete it.

2) If a comment uses words you wouldn’t want a child to say.
 Through Facebook’s settings businesses can set up the filter to weed out any bad words, but there are still clever alternative ways to spell curse words. People will find ways to swear on the page and in these cases, it is OK to delete.

3) If a post is completely off topic.
     For example if the business you run is a cookie brand and someone posts on your page about their disgust for members of a particular political party. It is ok to delete the posts that are completely off topic and out of place on the page. Just be prepared to explain why the post was deleted.

4) If a post attacks or is aimed at insulting another user.
     There is no reason to provide an outlet for people to insult another. Kindly ask them to take the attacks elsewhere and delete the comment.

5) If someone is hawking their wares on the page.
     It is surprising how many people see a single businesse’s page as the ideal place to inform people about their own completely unrelated product or website. It can be tricky when it is a blogger coming to the page and wants to use your product page as a way to get page views for his or her article or story, but this is when you evaluate on a case-by-case basis.

If a claim is made against a product or the company that is blatantly false, it is better to address that in the comments and leave it up for everyone to see. It seems that when people come to the page and leave negative comments, fans will come to the rescue and fill the page with positive words about the business.

How people can and cannot talk in your public forum should be outlined in your community guidelines in as vague or specific language as you feel comfortable using. As long as you have those guidelines to point to as the reason you deleted a particular comment, you should have no issues. It’s only when you start deleting negative comments from your page with no basis that you run into trouble.

These tips are not only good for businesses to keep in mind but also any organization, club, or even individual people who are looking for a job or in keeping their own.