Last Thursday (October 28), Facebook quietly put into effect its new spam filter for Facebook Pages. It is a relatively small feature with only a handful of actions left up to the user; however, if you are a community manager and deal with a Facebook page for a company or small business, not being aware of the changes could cost you fans, therefore costing you revenue.

Facebook says the goal is to improve content on fan pages by offering automatic spam filtering on the page wall. "All Pages will now have low quality content filtered to the Spam folder within their Page wall filter," says Facebook, including that this spam folder is only viewable by admin.

You Hold the Key

While Facebook has its own methods of deciding which posts are spam, which I can't find, admins have their weapons as well.

While perusing your page's wall posts, you can easily mark items as spam.

• 1. Hover your cursor over the wall post.
• 2. Click the "X" that appear in the upper right corner of the post.
• 3. Choose the "mark as spam" option.

Then, you can view the spam tab by clicking "options" just above your page's wall posts. There, you will see all the spam posts listed, much like a spam folder in your e-mail.

On the other hand, you may end up with legitimate posts in your spam folder. Then, you can follow the same basic steps to move that post back to your page's wall.

• 1. Hover your cursor over the wall post in the spam folder.
• 2. Click the "X" that appear in the upper right corner of the post.
• 3. Choose the "unmark as spam" option.

So This is Good, Right?

There are those who think this new tool is a great new feature and there are some who believe it could create more hassle for page admins.

Good thoughts:

• Keeps Facebook pages free of unwanted messages.
• Teaches Facebook spam filters what is and isn’t acceptable.
• Allows page admins to build higher quality Facebook Fan Pages.

Negative issues:

• Could lose legitimate posts to spam filter.
• Increase in page maintenance (cleaning two locations: wall and spam filter).

Overall, in my opinion, this is a step toward a smarter, more efficient spam filter. Any thoughts against this new filter? Do you have information on how exactly Facebook selects which posts are spam?