Do you ever wonder why a large social platform like Facebook suddenly begins to push a service that has been in place for a while?
Recently, that’s what’s been happening with Facebook’s Business Manager. And while the tool is undoubtedly useful, some of these messages may be a bit misleading, which is why we decided to write this post. Keep reading for an introduction to Facebook Business Manager and how it can help your social media marketing.
Facebook Business Manager: An Introduction
Facebook first introduced the Business Manager as a marketing tool in early 2014. The idea was simple: a handy tool for busy marketers to centrally manage all of their Facebook-related business assets.
Here’s how the network itself described the tool at its launch in April 2014:
Business Manager integrates all your Facebook advertising campaign management efforts into one tool. It’s designed to simplify your marketing efforts.
Since its launch, though, Facebook’s Business Manager has largely been reserved by large advertisers and agencies. And that focus makes sense, considering that managing multiple pages and ad accounts simply requires more organization to be successful.
But in the last few months, the network is increasingly pushing the tool to smaller advertisers, as well. Features like easy-to-access insights, along with the ability to keep personal and business Facebook accounts separate, have become major selling points.
All of which begs the question: should you use Facebook Business Manager? What are its advantages and disadvantages, and can it help optimize your social media marketing?
The answer to both of these questions: it depends. Let’s examine the various uses of the tool, and when it may be better to stay away and go with an alternative solution.
When the Business Manager Comes in Handy
First, we should emphasize: Facebook’s tool for business page and ad campaign managing certainly has its uses. In some situations more than others, you’ll be happy for the tool.
Let’s start by examining these situations in particular.
If you have multiple ad accounts or Facebook pages to manage, the tool can be invaluable. By keeping all of your information centralized in one spot, you can gain an easy overview of your efforts.
Say you run a larger business, with multiple pages promoting multiple brands within that business. Keeping an overview on Facebook’s regular interface can be difficult.
Integrating it into your Business Manager, on the other hand, helps you keep your messaging separate but consistent. For that reason alone, advertising agencies have flocked to using the tool in large numbers.
If you are an savvy marketer looking to justify all of your efforts with statistics, but don’t necessarily have the time to take a deep dive into Facebook Insights or the Ads Manager, the Business Manager’s integrated analytics tool can also help.
Naturally, you want to know and understand what results your budget actually brought in. That insight can be invaluable in justifying the spend to your company, as well as maximizing your budget by focusing only on the most successful strategies.
Business Manager allows you to gain an easy overview of these success statistics and benchmarks.
A third benefit of Facebook’s Business Manager is that allows you to collaborate with multiple team members on a given Facebook page or ad campaign.
Finally, the tool can also be invaluable if you have an active organic presence on the network that you want to integrate with your marketing strategy. Because it enables you to easily schedule and review posts written by you and others, you can use the tool to more actively manage your organic Facebook presence.
When to Avoid the Business Manager
But as much as Facebook is trying to push it as such, the Business Manager is not (yet) a catch-all solution for all of your Facebook marketing needs. In fact, there are plenty of situations in which you might be better off not using it.
To start, the tool allows you to set up ad campaigns, but its options are more rudimentary than other tools. Especially if you want to focus your efforts on advanced methods like Facebook’s Custom Audience tool, the Business Manager may not be your best choice.
One of Facebook’s major advantages for marketers is the depth at which you can target your audience. For example, you can choose to retarget via custom audiences, or target based on past purchasing behavior, education level, and much more.
To take full advantage of these options, you may want to set up your campaign outside of Business Manager.
Another situation in which Facebook’s Business Manager may be a hindrance rather than an aid is if you are a small business marketer, with a straightforward goal.
Take the following situation: you own a storefront business, and have exactly one business page to promote it. You do post some content on your page organically, but due to the small size of your audience, most of your efforts are through paid campaigns.
Many marketers are in similar situations as the one above, and in that case, Facebook Business Manager may not actually help you. You can instead set up your marketing campaigns directly on the network, which requires less effort – not to mention the lack of having to learn an entirely new tool.
Make no mistake, Facebook Business Manager can be immensely helpful in organizing and optimizing your presence on the network, particularly if that presence is diversified or managed by multiple administrators. But don’t discount the cases in which the tool does not actually help your cause.
In the end, Facebook Business Manager is a helpful tool that can probably use refinement to unleash its full potential.
Much success,
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