facebook business manager explained and 7 reasons why you should use it

There has been an urgent debate of the late about the best way to manage Facebook pages. Why? Facebook are clamping down on fake accounts and that includes the one off 'work' accounts many people have. Facebook's Business Manager has emerged as a good way to go down this path. Here we look at what it is and why you should use it.

by George Vekic

In April 2014, Facebook launched Business Manager. If you’re new to the party, Business Manager is a tool for communications and marketing folks to manage users, advertising campaigns and payments, as well as multiple Facebook Pages in one handy interface.

The beauty of Business Manager comes from its efficiency. Simple admin of users. Structure for your campaigns. Data, everywhere. It will make your life so much easier.

On a side note, whilst it’s optional for management of Business Pages at the moment, it’s probably only a matter of time before Marky Z makes it mandatory for Page admins.

1. Manage Pages and multiple accounts

All your Facebook Pages and multiple accounts, in one place. Facebook Business Manager pulls all your ‘business assets’ – your Pages and Ad Accounts – onto a single interface. It can be quite daunting at first, with loads of buttons to click, so it’s worth getting to know what everything does.

2. User administration

The big idea behind Business Manager is that it provides a place for you to do business – as the name suggests. No longer will you have to add your coworkers as friends on the platform and wait for them to accept you like an awkward turtle.

One or two people should have ‘super admin’ access. These folks should be the people who access and publish on your social media channels on a daily basis.

They’re the ones who should claim and manage ‘Ownership’ of the business assets. You’re able to set different permission levels for each user granted access, too, based on their position in the business, what access you want to give them on your Facebook Ad account, and what publishing privileges you want to delegate at Page level. Note that there’s a distinction between advertisers and publishers. Responsibilities may overlap within the organisation, depending on your role. As a Social & Digital Media Officer, I have both advertising and publishing responsibilities.

3. Working with different sections within your organisation

If you’re working across a large, diverse organisation – such as a council, health service or police force – it can be useful to provide access to ad accounts and Facebook Pages to colleagues from across the service.

4. Working with external agencies

Understandably, the time may come when your digital marketing and advertising is outsourced to external agencies. With Facebook Business Manager, you can link up easily with agency staff by assigning them to your Ad Account with Partner Access.

5. Better campaign management

Within Business Manager is Ad Manager – one of Facebook Business Manager’s most useful features is an improved interface for managing your campaigns. At the top level, you define your Campaign – the ‘big picture’. Each campaign should have a single advertising objective, such as driving website traffic. Within Campaigns you’ll find Ad Sets – literally sets of adverts. Ad sets are useful in that you can set budgets and schedules for each ad set within a campaign. You’re also able to run concurrent ad sets in a single campaign, altering variables such as audience segments, audience locations, device usage and more.

At the bottom of the ‘tree’ are Ads. Each ad set can feature multiple variations of a single ad. This makes it super simple to A/B test variables such as imagery, copy, links or video. Pro tip: Facebook will automatically optimise anything you A/B test, meaning they’ll push the ad that shows early signs of engagement in front of more of your target audience.

6. Grouping Pages and accounts into projects

With Projects, you can group multiple business assets together – such as Pages, ad accounts, product sets, apps and even Instagram accounts. Again, it’s about having one interface for all your stuff. Business Manager Projects are useful in the sense that you can manage assets – and assign assets to other users – whilst keeping them contained to its own space. This means you can add the right employees and partners to the right projects without granting them access to assets they have no business with.

7. Go daft with data

The amount of data you can pull from Facebook Business Manager is incredible. If you’re a data nerd like I am, Business Manager is a powerful tool for learning more about your audiences – plus you can easily export them into glorious spread sheets. For a super quick example, we recently ran an advert promoting one of our postgraduate courses.

People identifying as male accounted for 77 per cent of all engagements, News Feed placements delivered better than Standard Ads, users in Italy and Greece were more engaged than other. Small chunks of information like this gleaned from Facebook Business Manager’s supercharged data collection allow us to hypothesise on potential markets and paint a picture of our audiences through user personas. From small acorns, mighty oaks grow.

George Vekic is Social & Digital Media Officer at the University of Sterling.