Facebook Business Manager – A primer

Facebook Business Manager was launched last year (so ages ago). It’s essentially a way of compiling Facebook assets and allowing team members varying levels of access. Which is perfect if you have multiple staff responding to your Facebook page or ad account.

It’s a great tool to have, not only for agencies (as it lets you see all your accounts in one place), but for small businesses too.  This way if a page admin leaves, they don’t take the keys to the Facebook page with them.

And Facebook really wants you to have one , but I routinely encounter a blank stare or an uncomfortably quiet moment after I say the words “Facebook Business Manager”.

Facebook even had a deadline for people to get their pages and ad accounts into a business manager, but that flew past and the world kept turning.

So if you don’t have a Facebook Business Manager – get one for free at business.facebook.com.

But before you do – take a quick peek at the page roles in any pages you manage and get a screenshot of all the people. (find it in your page under “settings”) Do the same with your ad accounts – under settings and “ad account roles”



When Facebook Business Manager first launched you lost everyone on sign up. They’ve since fixed the process immensely – but… safety first.

Set up is very easy, just follow 4 steps and you’re done in minutes.



In step 2 – do make sure you give yourself room to grow and don’t limit yourself with 1-10 pages…

Now I’ve Got Facebook Business Manager – What do I do with it?

There’s always a bit of growing pains with a new system, but here are the essentials which are found in the settings section.

1) Assign roles

It’s good to have more than one admin of your business manager, incase one person leaves an organization, they’re not leaving you in the lurch!

Here Alan & Mel are “employee’s” and Mike is the Admin.  Mike can control what pages and ad accounts Alan and Mel have access too, and can assign new people.  If Mel doesn’t have access to a page and Alan does, she wouldn’t know about it.


2) Pages

Here you can request access to a page, claim a page for your business or create a new one.

And you can assign staff the appropriate access to the appropriate pages

Analysts have very little access, admin the most. Most staff will be editors so that they can make changes and deal with comments. And you can always change roles in a few seconds

Key point here – If you’ve got an agency doing ads, you want them to have advertiser access to your page.  Without page access they can’t boost posts (intelligently) or run newsfeed ads.  Those are key areas to grow your likes and learn more about your target audiences!

3) Ad accounts

Here you can assign access again. But there’s a little bit more.



If you’re an agency, you’ll get your clients to assign their ad account to you. This way you can access their oh so important Website Custom Audience pixel and start making good returns on their ad spend.

You can also rename the ad account by hitting the pencil – so many people have some terrible 19 digit number, and this makes life much easier!

Add a new ad account lets you claim an account, create an ad account or find your agency number so you can give it to clients.

4) the overview

The default view gives you an overview of spend and impressions of all your Facebook assets. You can also see the ad spend of individual accounts and get a top level check of spend without having to go right into the account.


There’s even more you can do, especially with e-commerce sites and product catalogue sales (essentially dynamic re marketing). But make sure you get this started first!