How to Audit Your Facebook and Instagram Comment Section

Seven checks, twenty minutes. They cover the five things that decide whether your comment section helps you sell: speed, how much spam gets through, the hours nobody covers, the languages you cannot read, and whether buyer questions get answered.

1. 1Check the free filters are even onBoth platforms ship keyword filters and both are off until you turn them on. Facebook: your Page, Settings, Privacy, Public Posts, Content Moderation. Instagram: Settings, then Hidden Words.
2. 2Read what your filters hidSwitched on is not working. Open your activity log and read the last month. Empty means your list matches none of your spam. Full of real customers means it is too broad.
3. 3Date your keyword listIf you last touched it the day you set it up, it is a snapshot of that week's spam. Read a fresh scam comment from your posts and check whether your list would catch it. Usually not.
4. 4Time one bad commentFind the last obviously bad comment and check how long it stayed up. That is your real reaction speed, and a scam reply only costs you money while buyers can see it.
5. 5Find your ad commentsAd comments do not reliably appear on your Page timeline, so this is the check people fail without knowing. Open Ads Manager, open a live ad, read its comments. Seeing them for the first time is itself the finding.
6. 6Check the languages you cannot readList the languages your ads run in, and for each, ask who on your side reads it. A word list only knows the language it was typed in, so an ad in Arabic with an English list has no filter on it.
7. 7Ask what happens at 2am, and who covers youLook at a recent night: was anything posted, and when was it dealt with? Then ask who else can hide a comment while you are away, and whether they would know what to hide. If that lives only in your head, write it down as three lines.

Your activity log is the only honest record of whether your setup works, and almost nobody opens it. Everything else in an audit is an opinion. This is evidence.

1. 1Open the log on FacebookYour Page, then your professional dashboard, then Activity log. Filter by time and by which rule caught the comment, so your keyword list and the profanity filter show up separately.
2. 2Open the log on InstagramInstagram has no single log. Hidden comments sit collapsed at the bottom of each post's comments, so check your three or four best performing posts rather than all of them.
3. 3Count what it caught last monthNot what it could catch. What it did catch, in thirty days. An empty log under a page with daily spam means your filters are decoration.
4. 4Look for the customers it hid by mistakeA short banned word living inside an innocent longer one, or the profanity filter on strong catching someone calling your product unbelievably good. Unhide those, then fix the word.
5. 5Now look at what got throughThis is the half of the log that is not in the log. Open a live post and read it as a stranger would. Anything spammy still there is something your list has never met.

An audit that produces a list of problems and no order is a list of problems. Most of what you found is free, so do that before you consider paying anyone, us included.

1. 1Free, five minutes: switch the filters onContent Moderation on Facebook, Hidden Words on Instagram, and the offensive word filter on both. If your audit found any of these off, this is the highest return quarter hour in the exercise.
2. 2Free, ten minutes: refresh the listAdd the actual words from the scam comments you just read. Not a generic list from a blog, the words under your posts this month. Emojis count, and any language works.
3. 3Free, five minutes: write the three linesWhat gets hidden, what gets a reply, what gets left alone. That is the difference between someone covering your pages for a week and them touching nothing in case they get it wrong.
4. 4Costs time: put ad comments in the routineThe free fix is a calendar reminder to open Ads Manager. It works for exactly as long as you keep doing it, which for most people is about three weeks.
5. 5Costs money: the hours and the languagesTwo gaps have no free fix. Nobody is watching at 2am, and a word list cannot read a language you do not speak. Those need a person on call or something watching for you.

Where an audit stops

Running one puts you ahead of almost every page doing paid social. It is also a snapshot of a moving target.

• It is true on Tuesday and wrong by Friday

  You audit, you fix, you feel good. Then a new scam template goes around and your freshly updated list is one incident behind again. The spam changed and your list did not.

• You cannot audit what you never saw

  Every check here reads from your own memory and your own log. A scam comment that sat under an ad all night and was deleted by whoever posted it is in neither.

• Nothing reports this back to you

  No dashboard anywhere, ours included, tells you how your moderation performed this month. You have an activity log and your own eyes. That is why this is a manual checklist and not a button.

• Finding a gap is not closing it

  Knowing nobody watches at 2am does not put anybody there, and knowing you cannot read your Arabic comments does not teach you Arabic.

• It relies on you being honest

  The out of hours question is the one everybody rounds up. If nobody is genuinely looking at 11pm on a Saturday, that is not covered, and a generous answer only costs you the point of doing this.

So it is worth running and it will keep needing to be run, because it grades a setup that only knows the spam you have already met.

When the audit does not go to plan

• Why is my activity log empty?

  Three likely reasons. Your filters were never switched on. Your list has no word on it that matches the spam you get. Or you are looking in Meta Business Suite rather than your Page's professional dashboard, which is where the log lives. Check the filters first.

• Why can I not find the hidden comments on Instagram?

  Instagram has no single log. Hidden comments sit collapsed under the post they were left on, so you have to open each post and look at the bottom of its comments.

• Why does my audit look fine when my ads are full of spam?

  You almost certainly audited your organic posts. Ad comments do not reliably appear on your Page timeline, so an audit done from your Page comes back clean while a live ad is a mess. Open Ads Manager and check an ad directly.

• Why did the same problems come back a month later?

  Because a word list records the spam you have already seen, and the spam moves. That is expected rather than a mistake you made. Either accept the audit as a recurring job, or close the two gaps with no free fix: the hours nobody watches and the languages nobody reads.