Facebook group keyword alerts: what they do and who can use them

What Facebook's keyword alerts do

Keyword alerts are one of two kinds of moderation alerts. Facebook's Help Center is clear about who can use them: only group admins and moderators can set up moderation alerts in their group.

• Keyword alerts let admins know when members use certain words or phrases in posts or comments. There's no limit on how many keywords a group can have.
• Engagement alerts let them know when a post or comment gets a set number of comments, replies or reactions within an hour.

Alerts collect under Moderation alerts in the group's menu, where an admin can Ignore each one or Remove the content. They're built for keeping a group safe and on topic: spotting spam phrases, banned subjects and arguments before they spread.

Setting them up in a group you run

1. Go to facebook.com/groups and open your group.
2. Click Moderation alerts in the left menu, then Settings.
3. Next to Keywords, click Create (or Edit if you already have some).
4. Type a word or phrase, click Add, then Back.

If you run a group where your clients gather, you can add the words they use for your service. Expect the limits of any keyword list: an alert fires on the word, whether or not the post is asking for anything, and misses requests worded another way (why keyword alerts miss posts). And the alerts arrive as moderation work, beside the posts you may need to remove.

If you're a member

Members can't set up keyword alerts. What a member can do on Facebook:

• Search the group. Open the group, click Search and enter a word. Facebook looks through posts and their comments. It's useful for a look back, but nothing tells you when a new post would match; you have to search again.
• Turn on All posts. You're notified of every post in the group, with no filter by word or meaning. How to get notified of every new post shows how, and where that leads in a busy group.
• Sort by New posts and scroll. It works, if you're willing to check each group several times a day.

Watching groups you don't run

GroupSignal is a Chrome extension that watches the groups you've joined, as a member, with no admin role needed, private groups included. Instead of a list of keywords, you write what you're looking for as a sentence: Find people asking for someone to fix or build a website for their business. AI reads each new post in your chosen groups against it, in any language, and puts the ones that fit in your Sosaly inbox with a short reason.

It only reads. GroupSignal never posts, comments, reacts, removes or hides anything, so if you're an admin, keep Facebook's moderation alerts for moderating. It reads groups while Chrome is open on your computer and signed in to Facebook, and Sosaly shows when each group was last checked. Writing a monitor shows how to describe what you want.