You may have heard the term ‘digital properties’. Let’s pretend that your Facebook Pages and Ad Accounts are literally rooms within a big property, like an office. Your organisation has several team members, many of whom need access to some rooms within the office, but should not necessarily be able to get into other rooms. This office might grow in the future – you might end up taking on more rooms, or hiring more team members who need access to different rooms, while other team members might leave the organisation for new jobs.
Using a single shared login to access your Facebook ‘property’ is like having a single universal key which opens every door in your office, from the front door through to every internal room – and then making copy after copy that universal key and giving a key to everyone who needs to access any room therein. There are obvious security risks to this approach (including that your landlord – Facebook – doesn’t allow copies to be made of universal keys, and they might change the locks without notice!).
Asking your team to use their personal Facebook profiles to manage your organisation’s Facebook property is more like leaving the front door to the office open, but then asking people to use their own personal key for each door they need to access. It can get confusing, people mix up their home keys and their office keys, new team members don’t know where to go, former team members still have keys and can walk into the room when they like, somebody sets up a new room in their own home rather than the office and nobody else can get in… It can get messy.
The good news is that Facebook Business Manager provides you with a concierge-managed “lobby”, where access to individual rooms can be controlled and directed, without security risks or confusion. Every team member has a unique, work-only key to get in the front door of the office, and then once in the lobby, the concierges grant them access to all the rooms they need to get into, and only those rooms. If they start working in a new room, the concierges can change their access easily. And when a team member leaves, the concierges can revoke their access to the office entirely, in one easy move. The concierges can expand the office to take on new rooms, and can welcome new employees, all from within the one lobby.
You’ll notice I’m saying ‘concierges’ plural. There should never be only one concierge – what if they’re out sick? Or they leave the organisation? By having at least two trusted concierges who hold the ‘master keys’, you can ensure nobody is ever stuck outside the front door, or standing confused in the lobby not knowing where to go.
To set up Facebook Business Manager, and upgrade your digital property with a swish new lobby, you should first decide who will be the trusted concierges. A concierge should then set up the lobby (the Business Manager) and add each of the team members who will need access within the digital property (to the Facebook Page(s), Ad Account(s), Audiences and more). The concierge will also add the Page(s) and Ad Account(s) to the Business Manager.
The team members will log in using their work email address – no more confusion with the keys at home, or risk of colleagues peeking in through your home windows – though for a one-time only initial login, they will link this work email address to their personal Facebook profile, solely so Facebook can verify the ‘real identity’ of the person and avoid a plethora of fake accounts. From setup onwards, each team member will log into Business Manager using their work email address.
The concierges (Business Manager Admins) will grant Analyst, Editor or full Admin rights to each person for each property they need to access, so at a glance you can easily see who has access to what and where, and access can be added or removed easily and transparently. New pages and ad accounts can be created in this central space, and it makes it far easier to collaborate with partners, like agencies, too – without handing them the full keys to the whole building.
Once your organisation has taken on a Business Manager ‘concierge-lobby’, you will wonder how you ever managed your property access safely before! Using a Business Manager also allows you access to advance Facebook marketing functions, like pixel-sharing and custom conversions management. Take the time to upgrade today.
Start by setting up the Business Manager itself, by following these steps on the Facebook Help Center. Then, you should:
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