Seeing Spam & Fake Accounts on Your Ortho Practice Facebook Page? How People + Practice Recommends You Handle It!

Social media marketing for orthodontics is one of the most effective ways to communicate with current patients and connect with new ones. Your community on social media channels like Facebook offer unprecedented direct access to the people in your surreding community that you want to communicate with. But with great power comes great responsibility and some nefarious actors try to take advantage of this.

You may have noticed a proliferation of phishing messages in your Facebook business page inbox. They often say something like, “Your Facebook page is scheduled for permanent deletion due to a post that has infringed upon our trademark rights. We have reached this decision after a thorough review and in accordance with our intellectual property protection policies.”

Or you might have a host of spam accounts posting on your page underneath your legitimate posts and putting up fake reviews on your Facebook page that seemly have nothing to do with your practice but try to redirect people to a random link.

Nearly every one of these are from scammers!

It’s not just you. Facebook deletes hundreds of millions of fake accounts each quarter but their moderators can’t get them all. Sometimes a spammer will slip through and show up in your practice's business account. Many of our clients are dealing with the same issue and luckily People + Practice is on the job, helping to track these spam posts and eliminate them.

Fake Reviews

Clients have also seen fake reviews that have nothing to do with your orthodontic practice and point to links with unrelated content. We suggest you take the following actions:

• Report the review to Facebook 
• Then report he user to Facebook
• Block the user
• If you don’t have many reviews or your rating isn’t great, you may consider removing your Facebook Reviews page from view. Facebook has downgraded the value it places on reviews on its platform already, so you may be shortcutting the inevitable. 

Spam Comments

If you see suspected spam comment on your orthodontic practice’s Facebook business page, we recommend that you take these steps:

• Report the post to Facebook as Spam
• After you’ve reported as spam, go ahead and delete the comment
• Block the user

Phishing Direct Messages (DMs)

You’ve seen them by now we’re sure. The DMs that say your page is going to be suspended because of violations unless you verify your account. We suggest you:

• Report the account holder to Facebook
• Deleted them

We suggest that if you are a People + Practice client and you are unsure of a spam comment or phishing DM then send them to your Growth Consultant and we will take care of them for you. We also are vigilant about combing through our orthodontic social media clients’ Facebook pages to shoot down fake comments or messages before you even see them (or more importantly, your future patients see them.)

A few important points we want to stress:

• Don’t ever send your sensitive information, passwords, or contact information on Facebook to someone you don’t know or have 100% verified their identity - remember when in doubt, leave it out!
• Don’t click links unless you are 100% sure you know who it is coming from on Facebook. - always verify the source
• Go with your gut. If it looks suspicious, it probably is!
• Be wary! If you suspect foul play, then delete and block the poster - any legitimate resource will know how to get in touch with you offline
• Spelling or grammar errors are the biggest red flags that a post is not real
• Also, Facebook will generally not send you a link to a website off its platform to resolve issues so make sure you check for these links, especially if they don’t have Facebook.com or Meta (Facebook’s parent company) in them
• Facebook will also notify you of any issues with your FB business account/page on your Meta Business Suite homepage (https://business.facebook.com). It is a great way to double-check if the Facebook message is legit. 

Facebook's help center says people should watch out for messages from unknown users: "If you get a suspicious email or text or social media message claiming to be from Facebook, don't click any links or attachments," the company says. "First, check in your Facebook settings whether it came from Facebook."

Here is the silver lining in all this: If Facebook wasn’t an effective medium to connect with people with your message then it wouldn’t be targeted by spammers. We believe that effective communication on social media is still one of the keys to growing your orthodontic practice and we want to work with our clients to ensure it remains that way.

Are you looking to add social media marketing to your marketing services with People + Practice or want to hear more about what People + Practice can do for you?

Click here to schedule an meeting with People + Practice today!