Social media bots are impossible to avoid on public business profiles. Healthcare practices and medical companies rely on social media to connect with new and current patients or customers. It can easily become discouraging when marketing teams open up social notifications to spam comments, message requests, and post likes. While they can be annoying, bots aren’t completely useless. Any post engagement increases potential reach and impressions – even if that post engagement comes from bots. Still, you want your practice to appear credible and professional online which can be hard to do when your comments are filled with spam. The most publicly visible and concerning social media bot activity your team should monitor and control is post comments.
Here are some quick tips on limiting bot activity on social media:
1. Filter Your Instagram Comments
Your practice’s social media team can proactively filter comments on your business Instagram profile to hide any unwanted spam comments. Using the “Advanced Comment Filtering” feature on Instagram, healthcare practices can automatically filter out offensive words or phrases. Your team will be allowed to review any comments that are automatically hidden to determine whether or not you’d like them to be visible on your post. In the “Custom Words and Phrases” section, your team can add a list of custom words and phrases to hide in comments in addition to the preset list in Advanced Comment Filtering.
Our recommended list of words to filter:
- Bills
- Bio
- Cash Prize
- Check This Out
- Click This Link
- Debt
- DM
- Follow For More
- Follow Me
- Follow Us
- Giveaway
- Hot
- Income
- Message Me
- My Page
- My Profile
- Paying
- Promote
- Promotion
- Follow Us
- XXX
- $
- $5K
If your practice’s profile is targeted with spam comments often, analyze the common language being used and add to this list accordingly.
2. Avoid Popular Broad Keywords
Social media bot accounts target profiles that use high-search volume hashtags. The average rule of thumb should be to avoid hashtags with over 10 million posts. Instead, try using a larger number of nice hashtags or location-based hashtags. Generally, this approach will get your practice’s social media content in front of the right audience – not just an irrelevant large audience who will not convert to patients.
There are a few ways to research popular vs. niche Instagram hashtags and how often they are used. In the Discover tab of Instagram, your social media team can search for hashtag ideas and the results will tell you just how popular it is. Additionally, you can click on a hashtag in-feed to see the same results.
3. Report Fake Accounts
This might seem like the most obvious solution to social media bots. With the ever-growing to-do list of marketing teams, this step easily becomes overlooked and forgotten. However, it’s better to be proactive in reducing spam before it happens. Blocking and reporting these bots and fake accounts will lower your follower count, but will also reduce the chances that they will leave annoying comments on your posts.
Are you looking to improve your healthcare practice’s social media presence? Points Group is a leading full-service marketing agency that can help you with design, content creation, and social media strategy. Contact Points Group to get started!
