Launched in 2014, Facebook Business Manager helps advertisers and large organisations manage their Pages, Ad Accounts, Pixels, Instagram accounts, and other assets more effectively.
It includes everything from controlling user access to your Facebook Pages, to payment methods for adverts and boosts, and even managing your Product Catalogs for eCommerce.
It’s also a central place to track your marketing efforts, with detailed analytics reports and visualisation that show you how your ads and posts are performing.
Who should use Facebook Business Manager?
If you fall into one of the following categories, you definitely need to start using it:
- You’re an agency that manages Facebook Pages for multiple clients
- You’re an agency that provides advertising management for multiple clients
- You’re a large business that has several Facebook Pages and Ad Accounts, with multiple users involved in managing them
- You regularly outsource social media management or advertising to third-party agencies
Do any of those sound like you or your company?
Based on my experience doing social media management for companies big and small, here's why Facebook Business Manager is a dream come true for you:
1. Complete visibility of all your Pages, Ad Accounts and Resources
For bigger organisations with lots of Pages and Users, or agencies working with multiple clients with their own Pages and Ad Accounts, Facebook Business Manager gives you a top-down view of everything in one place.
In the Business Settings section, you can see all the assets your business owns or has access to (as a Partner), including Pages, Ad Accounts, Pixels, Lines of Business and more:
2. It’s easy to manage employee access to your assets
You may not have lots of Pages or Ad Accounts, but if you’re a bigger organisation with 5+ people working on your Pages, Facebook Business Manager makes managing user access a breeze.
In the Users -> People section, you can drill down to user-level and see what they have access to, including Pages, Ad Accounts and Catalogues.
Let’s say someone left your company. You obviously don’t want that person to keep their Admin access to your Pages. The GDPR risks for that alone are bad enough to give you some sleepless nights!
With Facebook Business Manager, you can simply delete their User Account and revoke their access to everything with the click of a button (scary, right?). If you didn’t use Business Manager, you’d need to go into the settings of each Page and remove them manually, one by one.
The same goes for adding new employees.
If you’ve hired a new Social Media Manager, you can simply add them to Business Manager, then set permissions in bulk for all the necessary assets in one go.
Imagine doing that with all of your individual Pages? 🤯
3. Easily manage access and permissions for agencies and your clients
If you collaborate with anyone outside of your company, Facebook Business Manager has got you covered.
Giving access to agencies
If you outsource any Facebook marketing activities to an external agency, you can simply add them as a Partner and manage their access in the same way you would an individual user.
The difference is that when you give Partners access to assets, they can then handle access for their own employees themselves.
This means you don’t have to faff around with adding each of their employees, which can be a pain when working with agencies that regularly change client account resourcing.
Getting access from your clients
If you’re an agency yourself, the benefits are sort of mirrored.
Once your client adds you as a Partner, you can handle permissions for your individual team members yourself.
Gone are the days of pestering the client to give your new Marketing Analyst access to their Page’s Insights for reporting!
At the top of the Page settings in Business Manager, you can see which permissions have been given to you underneath the Page and Client details.
If you need more permissions, like posting to the Page, you can request that from the client once then upgrade your own team members as and when you need to.
4. There’s Instagram analytics(!)
After years of relying on expensive third-party analytics tools and Instagram’s in-app Insights section, Facebook recently made every Social Media Manager’s dreams come true with their Instagram Analytics suite, built right into Facebook Business Manager.
The Analytics suite has all the metrics you need for Instagram and, of course, Facebook Pages.
However, if you really want to understand your audience, you can dive into the data and see how your audience actually interacts with your posts and profiles beyond standard engagement metrics.
For example, I’ve created a funnel report for one of our business school Instagram accounts to see how many people, 1) Viewed a paid advert -> 2) Visited our profile -> 3) Followed us.
Here’s what that looks like.
Paid Advert to Follower Funnel
The data above tells me that whilst we’re reaching lots of people, only a very small percentage of them go on to follow us. That therefore tells me that our Instagram profile needs reviewing to make us sound as enticing as possible.
You can also create pivot tables to understand who engages with your content. In the below example, I created a table that shows me which age groups our post Likes came from.
Post Likes by Age
We can see that our content resonates very well with 18-24 year olds, but not so much the older age groups. That’s useful to know, as this account’s target audience is 18-30 year olds who want to study a bachelor’s or master’s degree.
5. Secure your assets with two-factor authentication (2FA)
If you’re a security-conscious organisation (which you should be post-GDPR), it’s a good idea to activate Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) for your Facebook Business Manager Admin users.
Once activated, any employees who log in to Facebook from an unrecognised device will be need to generate a special login code to verify their identity.
Why would you want to do that?
Page Admins have access to all your posts, insights and user conversations. If someone hacks one of their accounts, you’re in for one hell of a headache!
Business Manager Admins are an even bigger security consideration. They have access to every Page and Ad Account in the organisation, can modify payment methods, delete Pages and remove users at will. That's en even bigger headache!
To activate 2FA for your Facebook Business Manager, go to Business Settings, then near the bottom of the left menu, click Security Center.
In the 2FA section, you’ll have three options in the dropdown:
- Off - no authentication for any users
- Required for admins only - Page Admins have to use 2FA
- Required for everyone - Everyone has to use 2FA
The choice is yours. It depends on your company's IT security policies, how many Facebook users you have and how feasible it would be to roll this out to all of them.
Once you’ve chosen a security level, affected users (either admins or everyone) will be prompted to set up 2FA either through text messages or a code generator.
Common problems with Facebook Business Manager
Facebook Business Manager is an incredibly useful platform, but it isn’t perfect!
Here are some common problems that other Social Media Managers I’ve spoken to have shared.
It’s hard to set up and learn
Setting up Facebook Business Manager and adding your Pages, Users and Partners takes time, and the user interface isn’t very intuitive. On top of that, you’ll need to teach your teams how to use it as well!
All of that requires a big time investment, which means you’re spending less time on content creation and community management!
If you’d like to skip ahead and save yourself weeks of head-scratching, I offer a comprehensive online Facebook Business Manager Training session for individuals and teams. I’ll even set everything up for you!
It can be buggy
Facebook Business Manager is a big piece of software, so it’s prone to glitches and bugs.
From little things like not being able to navigate in Facebook Groups, to user permissions not being granted properly, to Page Inbox messages disappearing, there’ll always be something to scratch your head over!
It's easy to circumvent Admin access
Once you have Facebook Business Manager set up, you should always add new users via the platform.
However even with Facebook Business Manager in place, Page Admins can still add new users to the Page directly. These users are classed as ‘external’, so you can’t modify their permissions from within Facebook Business Manager.
In the above screenshot, the highlighted user is an external one, added directly to the Page by another Admin. As you can see, the user icon is different, and there’s no drop-down menu on the right to modify permissions.
Now all is not lost. You can still go into the Page Roles section of the Page Settings, and edit the user permissions the old-fashioned way.
Alternatively, you can remove them and send them an invite to Facebook Business Manager instead.
What next?
If Facebook Business Manager sounds like a dream come true, go ahead and set it up!
To start, go to https://business.facebook.com and follow the instructions.
If you need assistance or want help setting it up, check out my online Facebook Business Manager Training package.
