As your page grows in popularity and starts to attract hundreds and thousands of likes, it will also begin to see unwelcome attention from the less-savory members of larger online communities.

While this is a largely unavoidable side effect of popularity, page administrators can take steps to manage critics and trolls.

Know Your Enemy

Critics: These commenters may hurt a brand’s image by filling a page wall with negative assessments of the brand’s identity, products, or services. Critics can be difficult to identify and manage, as they can veer between being your biggest fan to most outspoken naysayer from one moment to the next.

Trolls: They differ from critics in by usually having no actual interest in the brand’s products and services, and only desire to cause problems. Trolls consistently post inflammatory, negative and disruptive messages to your page, with the sole intent of provoking an emotional reaction among the other members of your community.

Admins can employ the following tactics to ensure that their page is optimized to recognize and manage problematic posters.

Create A Customized Page Rules Tab

Facebook page should create a page rules tab that clearly lists the behavioral expectations of members of the community.

Take a look at Coca Cola’s House Rules for an example of how this can be done.

Not only can this tab help make all of your community participants more civil, but you’ll have something to point to if users ask why someone got banned from the page.

Take It To Email

If you feel that a customer has a legitimate complaint but that public correspondence might become disruptive to the page or even damage the reputation of the brand, it’s good to move things to email as soon as possible.

This has numerous benefits: the customer can speak more freely, you can provide a more personal level of support and if the matter gets heated it doesn’t have to be a public affair.

Reply to a complaining comment with your customer support email address or another email address they can reach you at and kindly ask them to follow up with you via email.

The business of moderating your brand’s Facebook page needs to be taken seriously.

To read more about how to handle disruptive commenters, check out the Facebook Marketing Bible.