BETH POWELL

 

You may have come across Facebook Business Manager by now and, either love it or hate it, word is it’s here to stay.

There seems to be a fair amount of confusion about it – exactly what it is, why it’s become a ‘thing’ and if you have to use it.  In this post, I’ll explain what Facebook Business Manager is all about and why you might want to learn more about it.

Business Manager is a platform, developed by Facebook,  that allows you to manage all your Facebook ‘assets’ in one place and transparently provide others with management rights to your assets; assets including Ad Accounts, Pages, Instagram Accounts, Audiences, Pixels, and Product Catalogues.

Some of the benefits of using Business Manager are:

• Securely invite others in your business and external to your business to manage or contribute to assets.
• Transparent management of assets
• Efficient access, management and reporting

Facebook Business Manager Provides More Security

 For the Business

Let’s say you manage Facebook assets for your own business and your business is structured so that you require multiple Pages and maybe more than one ad account. That means, too, that you’re likely to have more than one Facebook pixel. Increasing the complexity of this scenario is if you also have an agency managing ads on your behalf, maybe some others who are responsible for content. Now keeping on top of who has access to what and how they have access gets close to impossible.

I work with car dealerships, among other businesses, and this is a typical scenario for many of them. They have multiple locations, multiple websites, one or two different ad accounts, multiple Facebook Pages for locations and brands. There’s usually one or two employees managing these assets along with a variety of outsourced resources.  Often the easiest way for assets to be shared is to share the login details of the Page and the ad account or by appointing admins with their personal profile.

Now, I’m sure you can see already that that is not ideal from a security perspective. Once you’ve shared the login details, how can you really keep track of who will have access?

For Agencies and Consultants

If you’re a consultant or agency with a few clients, your business relies on efficient management of multiple assets for multiple clients.  And what are your choices here; connect your staff to client’s assets via personal profiles? If a staff member leaves your employment, then you have to ask the client to connect a new person via their personal account? Or do you set up the assets and own the login?  Either one is a bad choice.

How Business Manager Offers the Solution

Think of Facebook Business Manager as being similar to a social media management platform that you may be familiar with. An individual or business has a login to the social media management platform. Assets are added to the platform and individuals are assigned access to assets. Facebook Business Manger works in the same way.  Businesses create a Business Manager account and then add employees or partners (agency or consultant) to the account. Employees and/or partners are then assigned assets that they can access to work on. When someone no longer needs access, their access is easily terminated.  Personal profiles in Facebook are entirely irrelevant and there is no need to share logins of Pages or ad accounts.

More Transparency with Facebook Business Manager

When you have assets shared in the ’old’ way, it’s impossible to get a complete picture of who has access to what and who is actually working on your assets. Using Business Manager it’s easy to view exactly who has access to which assets at any time, the history of access, and make changes to access simply.

For agencies and businesses managing multiple ad accounts, another advantage is the ability to view the performance of all your ad accounts together on one page. No more hunting around, creating multiple reports and exporting for comparisons and insights. Your ad accounts performance is more transparent.

 Boosting Efficiency with Business Manager

 Oh! The days of logging in and logging out of multiple accounts, keeping up to date with password changes, having to friend someone in order to get access as an admin are gone. All that wasted time, now a thing of the past. I’m happy about that – I have memories of being in airport lounges trying to get urgent access to a client account and the whole process being incredibly frustrating.

Having all my assets accessible within one platform saves time. I can save more time by having all the assets of one business in a “project” within Business Manager. I don’t have to hunt for anything.  I don’t have to log in here and there. Likewise for reporting, all the assets in one place – click on what I want and create a report. For complex business and agencies and consultants this is a huge productivity benefit.

I could continue writing all the various benefits that Business Manager has brought to me but the post would get long.  In summary, Facebook has so many products now that the old ways of connecting people to the assets is limiting, inefficient, and can present security risks. The ‘old’ way of managing multiple assets is more time consuming and complicated given the complexity of the Facebook platform. In my opinion, it’s now become essential for anyone managing multiple pages or other assets either for their own business or for other businesses to use Facebook Business Manager.

I’ve written a training program on how to use Facebook Business Manager. In an hour each week for 4 weeks, with a weekly implementation task, the training program will have you mastering Business Manager. Here’s the link to learn more and join the training program.