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You open your Facebook group, and all of a sudden your amazing community starts resembling the Wild West. What do you do? That's exactly what we're tackling in today's episode. So teacher authors, go ahead and reheat that cup of coffee, because I'm your host, Cassandra Foster. And we're about to get schooled in socials. Welcome back to school and socials. Up until this point, pretty much all of these podcast episodes have been about what you can or should do, to have the best outcomes using social media to market your teacher business. But today, with Halloween being so close, we're getting a little darker, and taking a look at what happens when it all goes wrong in your Facebook group. The good news is that Facebook gives you a lot of tools to help you run your Facebook group smoothly. Let's do a quick rundown of them. And then I'll go in depth on how you can use each of them to make sure your community will stay positive and develop just the way you want it to. So you have group rules, membership questions, there's a potential spam alert, moderation alerts and group settings that can all help you manage your community and avoid the ish hitting the fan in the first place. First and foremost, make sure you set up your group rules like we discussed in our last episode. All groups have four rules that Facebook gives you at the beginning, you can edit the wording of these rules to fit your preference. Or you can even remove some of the rules if they don't fit. You can also add your own rules that are specific for the running of your group. If you remember, back in episode 31, where I chatted with SP about her Facebook group for self contained autism teachers, we found that people were sharing too much information about students and their specific situations when they were looking for help. So we added our own rule about what information was okay to share versus not okay to share in the group in order to maintain student privacy and keep the group ethical. Now when you start your group, you may be able to anticipate some of these things that you don't want to see happening. So make sure that that rule is added right away. And if something like the situation I just described comes up, make sure to update those rules accordingly. Then, you have the ability to create membership questions. I might sound like a broken record here, if you've listened to the other Facebook group episodes this month, but please, please don't skip adding membership questions. Make sure to vet every member before you add them to your community. This is going to save you so many headaches down the road. Next, Facebook has actually started to scan groups looking for spam as well and will now alert you of any potential spam they find in your group on the sidebar. This makes it so much easier to suss out spam in your group. You can review those alerts and either mark them as spam or say they're fine for the group. Beyond Facebook scanning for spam, you can set up moderation alerts where you can add criteria such as certain keywords. And if that keyword appears in a post or comment, you will be alerted so you can review it. Some keywords that you might consider are any obscenities that you don't want showing up in your group, or words that might indicate someone is self promoting themselves such as the word like share or link, if you wish to keep that out of your group as well. And finally, Facebook has given you a ton of settings under the group's Settings section that you can customize to help your group run smoothly, you can decide what types of accounts like profiles or pages are allowed to join your group. If any types of members can be pre approved to join, you can turn on or off anonymous posting. You can require post approvals, and even decide what types of posts can be shared within the group things like polls, gifts, files, etc. You can narrow down what can be shared. If you utilize all of these features, the likelihood that the ish hits the fan in your Facebook group is much lower. So don't sleep on all of the options Facebook gives you hear. But even if you take advantage of all of those options, sometimes a post or comment that goes against your rules pops up. So what do you do then? Again, Facebook has given you a lot of options which is great. You can remove the post or comment hide it, remove the post or comment while also banning the author of it from the group. You can suspend a member for a certain amount of time or you can limit a members activity so they can only post so much. It's Specifically, when it comes to posts, you can also turn off commenting if it is a post you don't want anyone else engaging in, or you can just delete it too. And you can also require post approval for just one person. Now, when taking these actions, Facebook will often give you a chance to explain why the post or comment is being removed to the member who posted that content. And I recommend always trying to provide a reason for why you're removing the post or the comment. Sometimes people just genuinely make a mistake or forget about a rule. So reminding them of that is helpful to correct the behavior. However, I would only tolerate one slip up though, and then remove that member. This will save you a lot of headaches and time policing your group in the long run. By the way, this is your group. And if you want to ban a member the first time they break a rule, you can do that. That is completely up to you. I work with clients who do both some groups I go in to do community management. And if they've messed up, that member gets booted right away. And some we give one warning before removing. And both methods have allowed us to cultivate positive communities in those groups. There is so much pressure this time of the year to buy more stuff from Black Friday sales to Christmas ads. But I don't want you to buy more stuff, I want you to get the right things you need to uplevel your business in this season. So that's why I've opened up my mini Social Media Console scheduled for the next three months. So that we can make resources that are going to get stuck in your downloads and courses that are going to go immediately to your desktop graveyard, like thing of the past. Instead, you're going to get my brain and your business for a focus 30 minutes so that you can make sure you have a solid plan moving forward. And you know, your social media will help you reach your business goals. This is not a one size fits all solution. Instead, you're going to get targeted advice that is focused on you and your business. And for Black Friday. And until the spots sell out, you're going to be able to get it for $47, which is the lowest price point these mini consults have ever been. We're talking transformational advice that will make your social media work harder for you. For less than a night out. This isn't stuff. It's the thing you need to get clarity and move forward with your social media marketing, you can grab your discounted spot right now in the show notes. But hurry, because once these spots that I've opened up for the next three months are gone, this price point will be gone too. I can't wait to make 2020 for the year that your social media marketing helps you reach all of your big business goals.
But Cassandra, what if things really start to get out of hand? First, don't panic, that I want you to do these three things, at least. Number one, update your group rules to take into account any member behavior you would like to see stopped and share the updated rules in the group as well as pin them to the pinned posts so that they are easily seen every time a member comes to the page. This might be a time where you say no exceptions to breaking the rules and banned members right away. Number two, update your membership questions to make it harder for people who aren't truly a good fit for your community to get into the group. Also, update how you vet those members. When deciding to approve them or not. You can take a look at their main profile. I've actually caught a spammer this way. They had answered the questions. Well, there was a picture of a woman with a family as the profile pic. But a quick scroll on the main profile showed that the profile actually belonged to a man who posted a lot of spammy type posts, and had probably stolen the pictures and was pretending to be someone else. You can also see how long they've been on Facebook, you can see if someone from the group has invited them. All those little pieces of information can help you make the final decision before they come into your community. And number three, when all else fails, turn on post approval, at least for a little bit as the community vibrates itself. This does make more work for you. But if you spend a few weeks vetting what is going up in the group and banning those members that don't regard the rules, you can quickly build back up the community you want. Just know that if the ish hits the fan in your Facebook group, it is not the end of the world. There are enough tools in place for you to write the ship and get your community back on track. Just like anything else, though, the best way to keep your group running smoothly is to take advantage of all of those preventative measures that Facebook provides. So I highly suggest if you already have a Facebook group to go take a peek at all those tools we chat about today, and make sure they are set up according to your preferences and guidelines. As soon as this episode is done. Now, we've spent the whole month talking about Facebook groups. So if you've been following along this month, my guess is you probably have one for your teacher business. So to go along with our monthly theme, I'm calling all of the Facebook group running teacher printers out there to leave a podcast review and share with me what your Facebook group is all about. Alright, cool coffee friends. Thanks so much for listening. If you're loving getting schooled in socials, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Also, I would love it if you left a review so that other teacher authors like you can start getting schooled in socials too. All right, I'll see you in the next episode.