Few days ago I decided to post a #ThrowbackThursday post on my Facebook page.
I found an image dated roughly a year ago and started to work on the new post and then something attracted my attention: The image was off, more specifically it has way too many tags on.

Turns out some enterprising Facebook user with 4 different accounts (all similarly named) tagged all of them to numerous posts/images I posted last year.
In my defense I purposefully allowed tagging images by other users in order to allow my clients or models to tag themselves in the images if they wish to do that.

It instantly became clear – Page Settings review and Cleanup is in order.

Clean-up

Unfortunately it’s not possible to Ban users on your page in Facebook if they didn’t leave a comment or didn’t like your page. And even if user in question did like your page and your page has many likes (in my case 5000+) scrolling all 5000+ users to find one you need to ban is not an easy task. Luckily there’s a way to do this, here’s a youtube video:

On top of that it took quite some time to search and remove all the extra tags from the posts, I wasn’t optimistic about Facebook abilities and didn’t attempt to find a way to automate the process.

Next comes settings review for the page

To change relevant setting go to you Page by click on your Page name in the left pane and then click on Setting button in the top left corner.

 

From here you want to check few of the security related settings

• Publishing Ability. You would most likely prefer not to allow folks other than your admins to post on your page
  
• Messages. You may or maybe not allow others to send your Page private messages
  
• Tagging Ability. Here’s the point where I failed. I recommend disabling this
  
• Age restrictions.
  
• Page moderation. Use this to auto-moderate comments.
  
• Profanity Filter. Some more auto-moderation help.
  
• Admins. Here you want to make sure that you have right folks with right permissions to the page. Unfortunately creating additional Facebook account to use as a page admin is violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. So admins have to be diligent about securing their personal accounts, if admin account gets compromised – Page gets compromised. To help keep their personal accounts secure, all Page admins should be familiar with and follow the tips and best practices listed on the Facebook security page.

 

• Applications. I have very few applications on my Page. If you do, research before you use a third-party applications. You need to know what information the app accesses, make sure the app doesn’t ask for more information or access than it needs. There are many apps that provide limited functionality, but ask for lots of information and access.

 

• Banning. You can also remove or permanently ban troublemakers from your page. It’s fairly simple procedure to Ban someone who left inappropriate comment, however to Ban someone who didn’t comment on your Page is challenge, you can refer to YouTube video above on how it can be done.

 

Lastly

To help protect your business or brand, you should periodically search Facebook for any third-party pages or profiles about your page/organization. Users could create hate groups and imitation pages about your organization or brand for malicious reasons.

If you do find inappropriate content you can report it to Facebook. Even if you find a username of a page or personal profile that infringes your rights, you can report that as well.

Disclaimer

This quick post is in no way can be considered a comprehensive Facebook Page security writeup, it’s limited to my personal knowledge and experience.