What's the big deal about Meta Business Manager?
If you run a business and use Facebook and/or Instagram for any of your marketing, then I’m here to recommend you get your Business Manager set up (optimally) as soon as possible.
The good news is that it's free and provided by Meta themselves.
The less good news, is that it’s not all that intuitive and so left to your own devices aren't likely to create that solid foundation without some degree of hand-holding.
Which is why I've created a FREE Business Manager Setup Guide & Checklist for you to download and keep (including a step-by-step video walkthrough) to ensure you get there quickly, easily and without feeling the need to bang your head against the nearest brick wall (all in the time it takes to drink your favourite hot beverage*).
*times may vary depending on the size of your mug and drinking speed
Now back to exactly WHAT Business Manager is...
I like to think of Meta Business Manager as a Home Hub with various rooms you and others can access depending on the digital key cards you hand out.
The rooms represent different parts of your business inside Meta, such as your Facebook and Instagram pages, any ad accounts, web domains, pixels (tracking code you place on your website) and any people (including yourself) who are connected to or require any level of access to any part of your business.
However many or few of these currently apply to you, read on to find out WHY I believe you need to get a Business Manager in place sooner rather than later, especially if you’re running ads.
Reason #1: Control
Once created, your Business Manager can house all of your company’s assets under one roof, becoming the command centre from which you connect, manage and control them all. This includes assigning the appropriate level of access to relevant individuals both inside and outside of your business, so you can easily toggle them on and off as required.
If you ever plan to run Facebook or Instagram Ads, then having a Business Manager is by far and away the best way to do this, giving you centralised access to all of your events, audiences, account quality, billing, reporting etc.
Essentially, you are making life unnecessarily hard for yourself without one and so setting one up properly, should be the very first step you take if you see ads being any part of your future.
Reason #2 Security
Do you know how to provide the highest level of security to all the different parts of your business within the Meta universe? With so much at stake from personal data, to credit card information, to the time, effort and energy it took to grow your audience - this should be a top priority for all businesses.
At the very basic level, you’ve hopefully enabled 2-factor-authentication already in your Facebook & Instagram accounts. But that just applies to you. What if you need others inside your business to take on certain roles? Or you need to allow access to external providers such as Virtual Assistants or Ad Managers? Without a Business Manager, you can assign *some* roles through your page admin settings or you would need to share private log-in details, giving them open access to your personal account and enabling them to act in your business as if they were you (which is a huge risk whether you gave them your actual log-in details or used a service such as LastPass).
Then if either you (or someone acting as you) were to get ousted off the platform for a violation or because you got hacked or because someone you trusted did something bad or made a mistake, that’d be game over with a hard and sometimes impossible route back. By ringfencing each area of your business inside a bespoke Business Manager, you are protecting every other area of your business from each other and therefore mitigating risk. Think of everything you’d lose if one domino were to fall. I don’t want that to happen to you.
Having a Business Manager in place allows you to set up 2-factor-authentication for all users, with everyone accessing through their own profiles, either as an admin, an employee or as a partner - you decide. You get to keep billing information and other sensitive data separate and secure from other users in your business, along with permissions over who can do what. If protecting your business from security issues is of concern to you, then having a robustly set up Business Manager is the best way to do that.
#3 Privacy & Professionalism
Without a Business Manager to control who and how different people can act in or partner with your business safely, there’s also the issue of privacy. Do you want other people inside your personal account? Do you want to become Facebook friends with companies you work with so they get to see your holiday photos or what you had for dinner last night?
Having a Business Manager enables you to stay professional with a degree of separation between you and your business and protects each element of your business and personal life from each other.
If you are a one-person company doing all the jobs yourself, never needing to share your details and you never plan to run ads, you may be wondering if this is still relevant to you… It may not surprise you to hear me argue that yes, I’d still advise that. For one you could get shut out of your account and without a trusted admin to let you back in, that could be fatal for your business assets. It also affords you that level of separation from your business and the privacy that comes with that. And should you ever change your mind about running ads, you’ll be good to go with a captured history of website traffic that would otherwise go to waste. If you spend longer than 5 minutes debating the pros and cons you’d be better off just doing it!
Next steps
For the sake of a one-time setup taking around half an hour of your time - I hope you can see the benefits of professionalising, protecting and controlling your business with a Meta Business Manager. And it just so happens I’ve created a FREE resource to help you check that off your to-do-list today.
You may already have one but aren’t 100% sure what does what, or if you’ve set it up in a way that sufficiently protects your business. In which case I would recommend you also take the time to review your settings, which is never a bad idea to do periodically anyway.