Despite its controversy over the past couple of years, Facebook holds its place as the world’s most popular social media platform with a massive 85% of all internet users having a personal account. Facebook also continues to grow on the professional front as a powerful marketing tool for businesses and schools alike. But, when it comes to managing professional pages, many still struggle to separate personal from professional, often resulting in the oversight of notifications and activity — enter Facebook Business Manager.
What is Facebook Business Manager?
Facebook launched Business Manager as a free tool designed to help companies of all shapes and sizes streamline management of professional accounts, pages, and advertising campaigns. Essentially, Facebook Business Manager allows your marketing team to manage all activity for your school’s page from one secure and centralised place.
One of the major selling points for Facebook Business Manager is that you’re no longer required to join your professional page to your personal account. This means that gone are the days of being distracted by your personal newsfeed, filtering personal and professional notifications, or (our personal favourite) having to add colleagues as friends just so that you can provide them with administrative access.
Why should my school use it?
The good news is that Facebook Businesses Manager is for all businesses and schools, no matter the size. Although the tool comes in particularly handy for those who manage multiple Facebook pages, it’s still a great way to streamline your activity if you just have the one page.
Here are just a couple of reason’s why you might find Facebook Business Manager helpful for your school:
Oversee page roles and access levels
Alright, time for a quick show of hands, who here has been guilty of not realising that an ex-employee is still listed as a page administrator on your school’s Facebook page? If this is you, don’t worry we’re not judging, this is a super common oversight made by many, but it’s also a huge security breach!
Just one of the perks of creating a Facebook Business Manager account is that you can quickly see who has access to your school’s page and what role they’ve been assigned to. This enables you to quickly remove unauthorised staff members and add new members without the need to send a friend request first. This feature increases efficiency when on-boarding new staff who required access and tightens security to ensure only authorised staff have access to your Facebook data.
Ensure work-life balance
We can’t stress enough how important work-life balance is for social media managers. Unless you’re happy to receive a flood of notifications each time a post goes live, or respond to direct message enquiries after hours, establishing boundaries for managing your school’s Facebook page is key.
Facebook Business Manager addresses this issue by allowing you to link your work email address to your page notifications, enabling you to determine when you want to receive new notifications. Besides, what's worse than thinking your friend has tagged you in a post, but really, it’s just a notification for your school page…
Level up your ad campaign management
If you’re looking to engage a digital marketing agency to run ad campaigns for your schools, Facebook Business Manager can help play a role in streamlining this process. The tool allows you to provide external agencies with access to your account, so they can use assets and manage your campaigns. Once you’re set up with an account (more on this later), all you need is access to your partner’s business ID. If you’d prefer to keep things in-house, you can always manage your own ad campaigns and run reports within the tool as well.
Sign me up!
So, if you’ve made it this far and you’re ready to streamline and centralise your school’s Facebook activity, there’s just one thing left to do — create your account. As we mentioned, Facebook Business Manager is completely free to use, all you’ll need to get started is a personal Facebook account to confirm your identity. From here, you can get set up in just four easy steps:
- Head over to the Facebook Business Manager page
- Click 'Create Account.'
- Fill out the relevant details for your school's page
- Move through the on-boarding wizard to learn your way around the tool
If you'd like to know more about Facebook Advertising for your school, be sure to check out our post about paid social media for schools.