Business Suite Streamlines Facebook, Instagram & Messenger Marketing 

Managing Facebook, and its extended family of apps, day to day can be a painful experience.

Over the years, as the Facebook network has grown and become more sophisticated, day to day execution has become far more challenging, due to the dizzying array of marketing features and the complexity of its various marketing interfaces.

However, in an attempt to streamline day-to-day management Facebook has just launched a new app designed to make it easier for businesses to manage in a single place their pages and profiles across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.

The new app, Facebook Business Suite, appears to build upon and streamline Facebook’s existing Business Manager tool, but running across desktop and mobile devices.

Currently, Business Suite includes tools like posting, messaging, insights and advertising capabilities, improving the experience of managing a business across Facebook apps.

Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer, Facebook

“Today we’re introducing Facebook Business Suite, a new interface to help businesses save time and stay up to date by managing their pages or profiles across our apps.

It allows them to post to Facebook and Instagram at the same time, and manage and receive messages, notifications and alerts in one place. They can also easily see what’s working and learn what’s resonating with customers with Facebook and Instagram insights”

To access Business Suite, log into the Facebook account associated with your business. Then, if you’re eligible, you’ll automatically be redirected to Business Suite when you visit business.facebook.com on desktop.

Business.facebook.com has previously been, and is currently, the web domain for Facebook Business Manager.

What Are The Benefits?

At launch, Business Suite has four main features:

• Catch up on all your alerts, comments, activity and messages from Facebook and Instagram in the home screen
• Simultaneous share to Instagram and Facebook at the same time. You can draft up a post and schedule it for both platforms from the Business Suite
• Use insights more insightfully. You can see reach, engagement and post-performance for Insta and Facebook
• Create adverts for both platforms and view the results

The Business Suite will allow the user to prioritise and manage activity throughout the day, while the insights tab will allow for customer optimisation efforts.

You’ll now be able to streamline your entire social media efforts and focus more on other areas that need the attention.

Facebook and Instagram analytics can be a real minefield sometimes, and it can be tricky to glean useful nuggets of information from them. This change is designed to eliminate some of these concerns.

We’ve already got Creator Studio and Pages Manager for Facebook. Still, this new tool pulls together both of those and aims to be the only place you need to visit for your management – and the integrated messages tab is helpful.

It also consolidates the Instagram business management tool in one place and will help save time flicking between these different options.

How Do You Access It?

Facebook Business Suite will be gradually rolling out in September.

Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer, Facebook

“We’re building Facebook Business Suite for small businesses first, but this is a long-term investment to make this the main interface for businesses of all sizes who use Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.

It is available for small businesses globally starting today and will expand to larger businesses next year.”

Facebook claims that if you’re already using the Pages Manager App on mobile, you’ll automatically see the option to opt into Business Suite. If you aren’t currently using Pages Manager App, you can visit the iOS or Android app stores to download the Facebook Business Suite app.

There does, however, seem to be some confusion around running Facebook Ads. Although the launch collateral references the ability to run ads via Business Suite, the Facebook help section states: “Note that this product is not currently meant for those using Ads Manager for advertising.”

Perhaps, since the launch is initially aimed at SMEs, with enterprise to follow in 2021, that might be something which we see in the New Year.

Only time will tell.

Facebook Business Suite is rolling out through September.