Facebook Business Manager has been around since 2014, and yet many business owners still feel overwhelmed when confronted with the need to implement it as part of their marketing efforts. The transition from using Facebook for your personal needs, or even owning a simple business page, to creating a business infrastructure on the Facebook platform can seem daunting. And it can get confusing due to the many new concepts you are required to learn in the process. Facebook’s choice to name three distinct features with the overlapping “Business Page,” “Ads Manager,” and “Business Manager” isn’t helping the situation.
In this article, we’ll try to clear-up the confusion and answer all the essential questions on what Business Manager is and who needs to implement it. We’ll also share a few things you should know before setting up your Business Manager.
Managing your business activity on Facebook through your own personal account – the one you use to post pictures of your kids and share memes- is inconvenient. It creates a blur between your personal life and work identity. It’s especially problematic when you are part of more than one venture, want to collaborate with others, or want to help others with advertising on Facebook platforms. Logging in from a client’s account or creating a separate profile for work, can jeopardize your account security and is frowned upon by Facebook.
To solve these issues, Facebook created an interface that allows you to manage all of your Facebook marketing and advertising activities. Or, as Facebook itself puts it, “Business Manager serves as a one-stop-shop to manage business tools, business assets, and employee access to these assets.” Over time, BM became the central dashboard where a business can see all it’s Facebook related activity. It’s also the place where you can control multiple users’ access to additional resources like your Instagram account, pixels, product catalogs, and soon – business Whatsapp accounts.
The short answer is – anyone who wants to employ paid campaigns on Facebook platforms.
To run ads on either Facebook or Instagram, you must have the following:
1. A Facebook Page that showcases your enterprise
2. An Ads Manager Account connected to the credit card of the paying party
And –
3. A Business Manager that’s connected to both the page and the account
Even if you’re not currently running ads, but have several employees posting on your pages, you should organize your business activity on Facebook and Instagram through a Business Manager. A Business Manager is also necessary for anyone running ads on behalf of others, whether they’re a huge firm or a single freelancer. As we already mentioned, this is Facebook’s way to facilitate advertising professionals working with their clients. When you hire an agency that takes over the activity on your profiles, you should connect your BM to theirs for seamless cooperation.
There are several benefits of having a BM:
1/Everything in one place: BM is the central switchboard through which you can control all your activity. Go to the Business Manager settings to add Pages, Ad Accounts, and other assets. The settings tab is also the place to assign people to the assets they need to work on.
2/ No dependence on personal accounts: The Business Manager is not reliant on any single person – not even the one who opened it. That means that you don’t have to worry in case if your social media manager moves on to another position or you choose to switch your activity to a different agency. You can easily add and remove employees and agencies without worrying about changing passwords.
3/ Create custom audiences based on customer lists: This is a big one! As of 2018, you can only upload customer lists and use them to create target audiences in Ads Manager only if that Ads Manager Account is under the roof of your BM. If your business already has a database of past customers, newsletter subscribers, or loyal fans, don’t miss the chance to utilize it to create smart Facebook Audiences.
4/ Business level reporting: Business Manager is a great way for business owners to monitor the work being done for them by advertisers. You can see the performance of your ads across different ad accounts without searching for them in your various assets.
5/ More security: Business Manager’s Security Center allows you to set up two-level authentication and create back-ups, so your assets are safer and better secured.
-Even if you are the creator of your BM, you still need to give yourself access to the pages and ad accounts it includes.
-You can only create one Ad Account in a newly opened BM.
-Once a Business Manager claims an Ad Account, you can not transfer it to a different BM, so think through your Business Manager structure before you get to work.
Ready to set up your Facebook Business Manager? Go to https://business.Facebook.com/ and follow the instructions provided in Facebook’s help center.
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