Facebook Is Changing How You Manage Your Business' Accounts

As an agency with a dedicated online team, we understand the ins and outs of Facebook Business Manager. While it can cause some problems for the social media team, the tool also has various benefits. You only need to look at how Facebook used to manage business accounts.

Previously, an agency’s client has had to use their own Facebook profile to manage the business’ page. There were several problems with this approach:

• It was very easy for a business to post, like or share content as themselves, rather than under the business name.
• It was difficult for multiple people to administer the page if you had to use one Facebook profile. Agencies and marketers would try to get around this problem by creating extra, fake accounts. This worked until Facebook announced it would kill fake accounts, and remove the problem of these accounts generating likes.

To offer a solution to these problems, Facebook announced Business Manager in April 2014. Since then, it has been updated and tweaked and become much more effective than it was when first released. It’s now easier to manage multiple Facebook pages and advertising accounts using the one tool.

Now, Business Manager is seen as either a great tool or a major headache for agencies and businesses.

There are a few ways which the Business Manager will change how you manage your clients Facebook accounts, for better or worse:

Accounts are managed on a single hub

Agencies will be used to managing accounts through Pages. Business Manager means you log in through business.facebook.com, and there is no need for Pages anymore. This can be both a good and bad thing. While it is a single hub for all your pages, it can be a pain getting all the clients on to the one area.

No need for shared login details

Facebook Business is all about adding security and control to business pages. Now you won’t need to share login information. Instead, anyone with permission within the business can access the page using their own login. Once you sign up to Business Manager, the shared login information will be retired. You can also assign roles for everyone who has access to the page. Now there’s less risk of a disgruntled fired employee having the password to the account and running wild.  

It can be time consuming

If you don’t have a Business Manager page, you’ll need to set one up from scratch.

There are also constantly updates to its applications and processes. An agencies or business’ social media employee/s are forced to continually update their knowledge of how to even use the tool. When something that worked yesterday doesn’t work today, it can be a bit frustrating.

These updates happen because the tool often has bugs. You can expect to receive errors such as “your ads account has recently been flagged because of unusual activity” and “unable to post comment. Try again.”  

It’s easy to make mistakes

If you’re not the most tech savvy person, then it’s easy to make mistakes that will have a negative outcome on your business. Something seemingly simple such as changing time zones will result in your ad account being closed, and a new one will be created. When you change the time zone, the currency you are billed in also changes accordingly. More importantly, when your ad account is closed, all the ads on the account will also stop running. You’ll have to get the ads up and running again on the new account.

To avoid this hassle, it’s important to check the timezone before you start a new campaign. As a default it is set to Pacific Standard Time.   

Facebook Business Manager has definitely changed the way in which you or your agency will manage the business’ account. The jury is still out on whether these are changes for the better.