You have a page, want to advertise, and need to share business information with your team efficiently. What do you do next? We say use Facebook's Business Manager Accounts. Let's break down the Who/What/When/Why of BMA's!
Jared Budlong
What is the difference between a Page and a Business Manager account ("BMA")?
Facebook pages are the public-facing pieces of your non-personal FB presence. A BMA is a central account to organize all your non-personal pages and ad accounts. Our primary market is small to medium B2C businesses, so I'll focus on that demographic in this post. Just know there is a lot more functionality available for larger companies (and agencies like Blue Fish) to use.
Why should I manage my page with a Business Account?
There a few reasons I can give offhand:
1. It allows all page notifications to be routed to a business email address instead of the main email (usually a personal email) tied to your personal FB account. This can be beneficial in ensuring you don't miss important notifications like ad related alerts.
2. We have found it easier to manage access to employees and outside help, like an ad agency ;-).
3. You can create a separate Ad Account that can be shared with multiple people to make billing ads easier. It also avoids the need to give out your CC card unnecessarily and allows all ads to come through a single billing invoice.
4. These ad accounts have different permissions, so you can allow your accountant access to view the statements and give your ad staff (or partner agency) the ability to use that account.
5. Life is busy, you can set spending limits on your ad accounts to ensure you don't accidentally overspend on your ads.
There are more reasons, but you get the gist: BMAs allow for better structure and organization of your FB presence, especially if you plan to boost/advertise for your page(s). When it comes to Facebook pages: it's a pay to play game. If you don't spend money, your reach is severely limited.
Who should have access to the account?
Ideally, the business owner would create the BMA by heading to business.facebook.com. Once the BMA is created, the admin can add additional people with varying levels of permissions, including other Admins. Remember, the Admin(s) of a BMA have control of you pages branding and can remove another Admin from the BMA. This is different from removing them from the Page but should be considered when giving those permissions. Check out the table below for a breakdown of each role and the permissions available.
When should it be created?
While it's never too early to create a BMA, we suggest creating it when you have more than one person who needs access to your Facebook Page(s), whether that is just accessing analytic data, creating ads, or creating posts for you. As mentioned before, a BMA makes sharing a single ad account much easier, so if you plan to give access to another person or agency start with creating a BMA.
Where do I find help?
We have a basic tutorial written up on the blog to walk you through creating a BMA, linking your main page, and where to set up your business ad account. You can find that here.
