In the Communities Summit virtually hosted in October 2020, Facebook announced a couple of new features, one of which was Admin Assist.
In this article, we go deep into what admin assist for Facebook groups is, and how it can help you as a Facebook group admin.
There are different functionalities within Admin Assist, and we’ll be looking closely at each one of them to give you a better understanding of this feature. And, if you would want to activate it for your Facebook group.
If you read till the end, you’ll be able to get your hands on Convosight’s personal recommendations on which Admin Assist criteria to activate.
So, let’s dive right in!
– What is Admin Assist in Facebook Group?
– Why use Admin Assist?
– How to enable Admin Assist in Facebook group?
– Setting up different criteria under Admin Assist
– Is Admin Assist best for public Facebook groups or Private?
– Convosight Recommendations for Admin Assist criteria
What is Admin Assist in Facebook Groups?
Admin Assist is a new feature for Facebook Groups that allows you to set up automated tasks based on the criteria that you choose. It lets you set controls on what kind of content is published in your community, as well as who is allowed to post in your group.
These are common Facebook Group moderation activities that you do on a daily basis—but with Admin Assist, all of this can be completely automated.
An example of this is how you can set a criteria and automatically decline posts that include a link. Before, you would have to do this manually and explicitly state in your Facebook group rules that you don’t allow posts with links.
Admin Assist gives you full control over what gets posted in your group. You can control spam and promotional content, even if you don’t spend hours going through each post. This is extremely useful especially for groups with 100,000+ members getting hundreds of posts per day.
Another neat feature of Admin Assist is that you can provide feedback on the declined posts so the member can edit and re-submit the content once they’ve fixed it.
Bad characters in your group are now easier to handle too with the option to automatically mute and/or block members who violate the criteria set on Admin Assist.
Since Admin Assist requires specific criteria, and in some ways, acts as an AI, it can only do what it’s programmed or set to do. So if someone did something that warranted a mute or block, it will be executed by Admin Assist.
However, if that feels worrying since it’s pretty much a ‘touch-move’ scenario, you can rest easy now since there is also an Activity Log area where you can review and undo actions made by Admin Assist. This adds a balance to the automation and still gives the power to the Facebook Group Admin to make the last say or decision in terms of group moderation.
Admin Assist complements existing admin tools like post approvals and keyword alerts. In order to be an effective Facebook Group Admin that maximizes the new Admin Assist feature, it is still best to spend some time on your regular Facebook Group moderation.
Consider the Admin Assist feature as a new ally that can help you get more done, save you time, and provide swift actions on some repetitive tasks.
Currently, Admin Assist has been rolled out to numerous Facebook groups and is expected to continue appearing in other groups over the next few months.
Today, it is only available on your desktop or computer browser, but eventually, Facebook says that it will also be available on mobile.
There was early speculation that Admin Assist would only be available for Public Groups—however, Facebook has publicly said that it will be available for both Private and Public Facebook Groups.
5 Reasons to Start Using Admin Assist
Admin Assist is a useful tool that saves you time and makes your job as a Facebook Group Admin a lot easier. It frees you up to focus on bigger and more important efforts for your community such as creating valuable content, bringing people together, and holding events and campaigns for your members.
Moreover, if you’re looking for a reason why to use Admin Assist and incorporate it into your day-to-day work as a Facebook Group Admin, here are a few key benefits that it offers:
1. Saves time
Simply put, with Admin Assist, you only set up the criteria once and it will do all the work for you. If you used to spend countless hours manually reviewing each post that goes into your group, you can now have that time back to focus on more productive activities for your community.
2. Improved content
With Admin Assist, you can provide feedback to members who post on how they can improve their content to make it more valuable for the community. This will lead to better content being published on your group overall.
3. Flexibility in group moderation
With over 15 criteria inside of Admin Assist, you can set it up in the way that best suits your community. You don’t need to activate all criteria. You can simply select the best ones that fit your group and your own personal style of group moderation.
4. Transparency With Members
Your members can see the criteria for posts, so they know the rules beforehand. Additionally, you can also share the specific criteria that get tagged whenever Admin Assist takes action on a member’s certain post.
5. Healthier Group
Overall, Admin Assist lets you manage who can post, and what kind of content is being posted in the group. This doesn’t completely remove post approval. In fact, they work together so you can still review content that did not fit the criteria that you set. With a moderated group that only produces safe and valuable content for all members, this ensures that you have a healthy and thriving Facebook Group.
You’ve been reading about these Admin Assist criteria for a while now, so let’s dive right in and look into each criteria and all the other features of Admin Assist.
How to enable Admin Assist on the Facebook group?
To start off, you need to use your laptop or desktop computer because Admin Assist is currently unavailable on mobile devices.
You can find the Admin Assist panel on the left side under ‘Moderation’.
Setting up different criteria under Admin Assist
Currently, there are two main criteria for Admin Assist:
a. Criteria for Incoming Posts
b. Criteria for Published Posts
Let’s have a look at each of them in detail.
A. Criteria For Incoming Posts
The Criteria for Incoming Posts allows you to set which posts are allowed to be posted your group. This applies only to all incoming posts that have been submitted to the group but haven’t been published yet.
For posts that don’t fall under any criteria (more on this in a while), the content can still be manually reviewed in your Pending Posts.
Now let’s take a look at the different criteria for this category.
CRITERIA FOR DECLINING POSTS
1. New Account
Author has had their Facebook account for less than a certain number of months.
In the New Account criteria, you can choose to decline an incoming post based on the age of the Facebook account. If a Facebook account has only existed for 1 month or less, you can automatically decline the post. You can also set it for 3, 12, or 24 months.
When to use this?
While this can be a case to case basis, my personal opinion is that a Facebook Group that is 1 month old may either be a dummy account or a spam account. Though it’s not farfetched that a new authentic Facebook Account can be created in 2021, 1-month-old (or less) Facebook Accounts who immediately post something on your group can be a bit suspicious. Activate this if you want only authentic FB accounts to be posting in your group. Though I think the 1-month criteria is enough.
2. Percentage of Posts Approved
Author has not had 100% of posts approved or published in the past 28 days.
When to use this?
I’m personally 50-50 on this Admin Assist criteria. For me, there’s a case of over optimization, and this might fall under that. If you have a large group and a lot of members post—some of them might be ignored or unattended for a period of time. This criteria works well if you have a perfectly managed group that approves and rejects posts in a very timely manner. But for larger groups that have a huge backlog of posts, this might not be the best fit. But still, use this if you are comfortable with the criteria and you feel that this can help your group moderation.
3. Friends in Group
Author has fewer than a certain number of friends in the group.
When to use this?
It’s a case-to-case basis. If you are creating a tight-knit community, say a local community Facebook Group, then this might be helpful. Otherwise, if your community is global, this criteria won’t be a great fit because the idea is that you are accepting new people from different parts of the world. For big groups, or Facebook Groups that are looking to scale massively, this criteria is better off untouched.
4. No Profile Picture
Author does not have a profile picture.
When to use this?
If a Facebook Account doesn’t have a profile picture, there’s a good chance that it’s a dummy account or a bot. This is a good and pretty straightforward criteria that can be helpful to avoid spam.
5. New To Group
Author has been a group member for less than a certain number of days.
When to use this?
This criteria can be good for some use cases, but in general, if you are building an inclusive Facebook Group and you want to drive up engagement early on, it doesn’t make sense to have this criteria activated. I personally wouldn’t want to use this for my Facebook Groups. For combating spam, I think there are better criteria to choose from than this one.
6. Violated Group Rules
Author has violated group rules in the past 28 days.
When to use this?
I like this criteria because if a member has been proven to violate group rules in the last 28 days, it makes sense to filter their content for a while. The good news is that you can still provide feedback to the post so the member can adjust the content. You don’t necessarily have to turn this criteria on, but it has its uses.
7. Reported by Others
Author has been reported in the past 28 days.
When to use this?
Similar to the ‘Violated Group Rules’ Admin Assist criteria, you can use this if your group is strict in enforcing rules and respect member reporting.
8. Link to Specific Sites
Posts have link to specific sites.
When to use this?
I love this Admin Assist criteria. It’s simple, but gets the job done. If you want to block links coming from specific sites, such as porn sites, gambling, or even illegal sites, you can add them all here. Moreover, if you run a Facebook Group for your brand, you can also choose to add competitor websites here.
9. Keywords in Post
Post has certain keywords.
When to use this?
If there are certain keywords that you want to block, you can add them all here. If you’re not sure what keywords to put in, but still want to keep your Facebook Group safe from negative keywords that might impact your group, you can choose to toggle on the option to decline incoming posts that have commonly reported words on Facebook.
10. Links in Post
Post does or does not have a link.
When to use this?
This is one of the best criteria in Admin Assist in my opinion. Links in post has been proven to reduce the overall reach of posts. Facebook Group Admins who are mindful of the Facebook Group algorithm will be happy with this criteria. Turn this on if you want to ensure that no posts that contain links will go through and be published. Through the post feedback, you can encourage members to post without the link, and include the link on the first comment of the post instead.
11. Video in Post
Post has or does not have a video.
When to use this?
If you don’t want videos posted in your group, you can toggle this on. It’s a very general and case-to-case basis criteria, but if you want to use it, then it’s there.
12. Post Length
Post has more than or fewer than 10 characters.
When to use this?
If you want to keep the quality of content in your group higher, you can choose to use this Admin Assist criteria. 10 characters usually means 2 words or less, so it makes sense that posts with 10 characters or less are low value content and should not be in your Facebook Group.
13. Photos in Post
Post has a certain number of photos.
When to use this?
It’s really up to you if you feel that this Admin Assist criteria makes sense for your group. I see very little use case for this specific criteria though. However, it’s there if you want to use it.
14. Reshared content in post
Post has reshared content from outside the group.
When to use this?
If you want to avoid having your group used as a distribution center for other people’s Facebook Lives or Game Streams, then this criteria will be useful for you. There’s a growing trend of mass sharing of Facebook Lives in various groups to increase the reach and viewership of their content. If you want to avoid that kind of content, then this Admin Assist criteria is a must-use.
Using Suggested Criteria in Admin Assist
If all of this is a little too much for you, you can opt to use the Suggested Criteria in Admin Assist instead.
Below is the Suggested Criteria for incoming posts.
They have specific criteria set for the following purpose:
- Spam Posts
- Posts from Fake Accounts
- Posts that violate group rules
- Posts with profanity
- Posts based on author’s activity
- Posts with reshared content
- Posts with media
Facebook gives group admins the power to customize the criteria as much or as little as they want to.
Suggested Criteria can help early on if you still want to test the waters and see how you can maximize Admin Assist and make it co-exist with your daily habits as a Facebook group admin and/or moderator.
B. Criteria for Published Posts
There are fewer criteria for published posts within Admin Assist, compared to ‘incoming posts’. However, they still provide good protection for your Facebook group, in case some posts slip through the cracks and weren’t prevented by the ‘incoming posts’ criteria.
There are mainly two options:
– Remove published post if
– Turn off commenting if
Let’s take a closer look at each of them and see how this Admin Assist criteria for published posts can help.
Remove Published Post If
Similar to ‘Incoming Posts’, the Published Posts also offer suggested criteria for Facebook Group Admins who are unsure of which parameters to set early on.
The Suggested Criteria for Published Posts are:
- Posts with Conflict
- Contentious Posts
- Posts with Harmful Content
If you want an easier way of implementing this, you can simply choose among the suggested criteria that Facebook suggests.
One criteria that you can customize yourself is the ‘Reported post’.
1. Reported Post
Post has been reported a certain number of times or more.
When to use this?
If your group have members who are active advocates and care about the group rules, having this criteria activated can help keep your group safe from spam and harmful content. With this Admin Assist criteria, you are crowdsourcing moderation of your group and trusting your members and community overall.
If a post gets reported for 3, or even 5 times, there must be something wrong with that post since multiple members agree and have reported it. Instead of waiting for you or your moderators to login and remove the post, Admin Assist can automatically remove the post if it has been reported multiple times. This can prove to be useful, especially if you are running a global community, and you and your moderators are in different time zones. This ensures 24/7 protection from harmful and spam content.
Turn Off Commenting If
Similar to the Remove published post criteria, this Admin Assist criteria offers the same set of suggested criteria.
- Posts with Conflict
- Contentious Posts
- Posts with Harmful Content
Though there are two customizable criteria that you can use
1. Number of comments received
Post has received more than a certain number of comments in the past hour.
When to use this?
There are many use cases for this criteria, one exciting use for it would be for contests and giveaways. If you are working with a brand and doing campaigns where you limit the number of participants who can join, you can use this criteria to cap the number of comments. You can choose to cap it at 50, 100, 200, with 300 being the highest.
2. Reported Post
Post has been reported a certain number of times or more.
When to use this?
If a post has been reported multiple times, you would ideally want that post to no longer receive any comments. More comments means more reach—and more members of your community will see the content—which is something you wouldn’t want to happen. This criteria can be useful if you want to manually review the content before completely removing it. Turning off comments will keep the post from garnering too much attention while you sort it out.
Is Admin Assist best for Public or Private Facebook groups?
With all the different criteria and features that Admin Assist offers, Facebook Group Admins will be testing this over the next few months.
Based on the initial review I did, I feel that Admin Assist works best for both Public and Private Groups.
It doesn’t matter so much what your group type is, but rather how big your Facebook group is.
Admin Assist is a beautiful feature released by Facebook that will surely help admins like you with managing and moderating your group. But based on its features and criteria sets, Admin Assist seems best for big groups.
‘Big Facebook Groups’ can be subjective though, so here’s a good benchmark to see if Admin Assist is best for your group.
If your Facebook Group has more than 10 posts per day and over 1,000 members, then you will really start to feel the benefits of Admin Assist.
The bigger your group is and the higher the volume of posts and comments coming in daily, the more Admin Assist will be beneficial to your group.
If your group is just starting out and have less than 100 members for example, you can still use Admin Assist and it will definitely be able to help you—but don’t expect much impact.
BONUS: Personal picks for Admin Assist Criteria for beginners
It’s not a secret that Admin Assist can be overwhelming—especially for newer Facebook Group Admins. There are over 15 criteria, with different customization options for each.
Here at Convosight, our goal is to make everything easier for Facebook Group Admins. That’s not limited to just our free app that helps you manage, grow, and monetize your community—but also through content like this!
Here’s our pick and if you like it, you can use them and set them up on your Facebook Group too.
Admin Assist Criteria:
1. New Facebook account
A 1 month old Facebook Account is most likely a spam or bot account. Getting this setup protects your group from likely spam.
2. No profile picture
A Facebook Account without a profile picture is suspicious. Most serious Facebook users will at the very least have a decent profile picture.
3. Violated group rules
Good to set for 3 strikes. If a person repeatedly violates group rules, there’s not much incentive for him/her to stay in the group. Giving 3 chances is fair.
4. Keywords in post
You can set your own keywords and also use the suggested keywords from Facebook to ensure none of the negative keywords that can result into banning or shutting down your group gets through. This is a must-have IMO, especially with the Facebook suggested keywords toggled on.
5. Reshared content in post
Original content is always better and has more reach. Plus—you are able to limit spammy reshares from random Facebook Live Streams, which are rampant nowadays, especially in the gaming and Facebook Live selling space.
6. Link to specific sites
You can protect your group from negative websites, as well as your competitor websites (if you run a brand or business related group).
7. New to group
Though this can be limiting in some cases, it can be beneficial if you set this criteria up so that new members can’t post immediately then leave. You can get them into your group and allow them a few days to understand the culture and the kind of content that is allowed in the community, before he/she can start posting.
Ultimately, I highly encourage you to explore the Admin Assist feature and its different criteria so you can choose the ones that best suits your Facebook Group.
Admin Assist Moving Forward
With Admin Assist still in beta, you can only use it on your desktop computer or laptop. Eventually, it will roll out on mobile devices.
If you don’t have access to Admin Assist yet, simply keep your eyes open for a notification message to appear in your group about getting started with Admin Assist. The rollout is currently ongoing so you should have it in your group soon.
Facebook says that in the coming months, Admin Assist will evolve and give Facebook Group Admins new features that can help maintain high quality content and conversations, as well as building towards a healthy and safe community.
It’s still early days for Admin Assist, and it’s interesting to see where things go from here.
One thing is for sure—features like these give hope for Facebook group admins that the company is truly investing in communities and there are amazing opportunities ahead.
Enjoy exploring Admin Assist and do share with us your experience with it in the comment section below or in our Facebook group.
Creating value in the lives of others with my content, little by little.✨
Working at Convosight, I do more than just wrangle commas. I’m passionate about innovating new ways to create super valuable and actionable content about Communities and Community Marketing at large, and sharing it with the right audience.
I also happen to manage a global community of power admins on Facebook, and that’s where most of my learnings come from.
Do check out my latest blogs and feel free to share them! 💛
