Brands are experiencing more and more spam and inappropriate content on their messages, and sorting through spam is a time-consuming effort that takes your attention away from the messages that matter. With Engage, set up automation rules to easily handle spam content and use filters to control messages that were wrongfully categorized as spam. In this article, learn what automation options you have to manage spam and how to use filters in your feeds and Detail view to recategorize spam messages if needed.

Creating automation rules to manage spam

With automation rules, you can set up your feeds to automatically mark incoming messages as spam in Engage, mark messages as hidden in Engage to hide them on the native network, and mark messages as read in Engage based on different triggers and conditions such as keywords.

When creating an automation rule in Engage, use the Mark as Spam, Mark as Read, and/or Hide on Network options within the Then dropdown to find and manage spam based on keyword or label triggers you choose.

By defining multiple actions within a rule, you can, for example, hide a message on the network and mark it as read simultaneously. This allows you to automatically filter out messages you’ve designated as spam, saving you time by eliminating the need to manually review them.

After you apply spam management automations or handle spam messages manually, you will see the message tagged with the action and Manual or Automation, letting you know how the message was handled.

Using filters to manage spam

Use the Feed and Detail View filters in Engage to filter out spam and use the filters to find messages that were automatically categorized and handled as spam. This helps you review messages that were automatically marked as spam to make sure no valid messages were marked as spam incorrectly.

In any Engage feed, use the Marked as spam and/or Hidden on network filters to find messages that were marked as spam manually, by automation, or not marked as spam. You can find messages that are hidden, hidden by automation, or not hidden at all. The Feed filter will find the conversations in which one or more messages matches the filter(s).

In the Detail View when viewing a message, you can use an additional layer of filtering to filter in or out comments that are either spam or not spam, and hidden or not hidden.

You can manually Mark as Spam or Mark as Not Spam in case a message was wrongfully classified as spam by an automation rule. Additionally, you can manually unhide and/or mark messages as unread.

Additional options for spam messages

While viewing your spam messages, you can hover over the message to add labels, assign it to a teammate, hide it, or delete it (comments and page posts).

For X (Twitter) and Facebook spam messages, you can also choose to permanently block the user by clicking on the user's profile name followed by the block icon on the right-hand side of the page. For more information, visit our article on Blocking Users in Engage.