Have you heard of Facebook’s Business Manager yet? Chances are you haven’t, unless you’re working in an advertising or marketing firm or are responsible for looking after the Facebook presence of a large hotel chain. The business manager, for some reason, is one of Facebook’s best-kept secrets. It isn’t new, but Facebook isn’t really pushing it to non-agency users so far. Best of all, it’s free and it gets rid of some annoyances of managing Facebook business pages with a personal Facebook account. It also makes things safer and more organised.

Do you need Facebook’s Business Manager? If you’re only managing one Facebook page and, perhaps, one Instagram account for your hotel, restaurant, or bar you won’t need it. Please skip this column, grab a donut, and come back next month.

If, on the other hand, you’re managing more than one Facebook page, whether for the same hotel or for multiple hotels and/or restaurants (regardless of location), and if you have more than one Instagram account, don’t waste time and sign up today, because your Facebook life is about to get easier and more organised.

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Simply put, Facebook’s Business Manager provides you with a one-stop shop for everything related to managing Facebook pages and Instagram accounts and advertising on the two platforms. Once set up, it lets you assign team-members to “assets”, i.e. pages, advertising accounts, or advertising audiences.

Here’s an example: Acme Hotels has three properties in Dubai. All properties combined have eight Facebook pages (one for each hotel, a few more for restaurants and bars) and three Instagram accounts. Different people are involved in managing all 11 accounts and let’s say an agency is involved in helping with advertising. In short: it’s tricky to oversee.

Enter Facebook’s Business Manager: You set it up, make yourself and one or two other trusted people administrators, and add all your individual pages, Instagram accounts, advertising accounts, and other Facebook assets to it. You can then give people access to exactly the services they need. An outlet manager can be made an editor of his restaurant’s Facebook page, but won’t have access to any of the other pages. A marketing person in hotel A can share and advertising account with a marketing person in hotel B, with the overall budgets and account limits controlled by you. The business manager makes it very easy for people to collaborate and share resources, which makes things faster, more organised, and keeps costs down.

It also makes things more secure. Here’s a simple exercise for those of you who look after more than five or six Facebook pages: Go to each page and check the “Page Roles” in “Settings” to see how many people are currently connected to the page for administration purposes. Do you know them all? Is every single one still working for your company? If you can answer both questions with “Yes”, well done, you’re on top of things!

Chances are, though, that you’ll come across numerous people who left a while ago or who you don’t know holding admin functions on your pages. That’s a lot of potential security and reputation risks. Once you’ve tied a page into your Facebook Business Manager, your business manager account controls the page and even a rogue page admin cannot accidentally delete it or remove you. You’ll also be able to view and share the list of everybody currently involved in managing your pages and accounts — complete with their access levels.

Lastly, using Facebook’s Business Manager finally makes it possible to separate your personal Facebook account from your business activities. Now, you simply add people to your business manager by entering their email addresses.
And if you decide to take on an agency to help you, you don’t need to share your logins with them or make their employees managers of your page — you simply add the agency’s business manager account as a “Partner” in your account, assign the right assets, and that’s it.

Whatever you do: Keep it social!

About the Author:

Martin Kubler is the founder of Iconsulthotels and the CEO of sps:affinity, a boutique strategic business consultancy based in Dubai, UAE. Email: hello@spsaffinity.com.