Navigating the Maze of Meta for Business

Learning your way around the various tools and user interfaces involved in Meta for business is daunting! Even pros who use them on a daily basis get thrown and confused sometimes. Why? Because there are so many different services that overlap, intersect, and continuously change. Believe me, it can warp your brain, and the learning curve is enormous. It’s clear that Meta does not prioritize either user-friendliness or educational support. New features and changing structures pop up all the time with little or no explanation.

The importance of easy navigation

If you are a business owner and want to get exposure over Meta platforms, you’ll need to get your bearings as much as possible. You need to use your time efficiently, and that means being able to find things quickly. Common tasks like: scheduling a post, setting up a website event to be tracked, sharing access to business assets, or creating a custom audience involve some jumping around between screens.

Is there a logical guide or starting point?

To me, the maze of Meta for Business is like a huge indoor shopping mall. You walk in, and there are many different directions you can go. If you’re not familiar with the mall, you could certainly become more familiar by walking all around it a few times. That can give you a feel of the basic structure, so that you know where some key points of interest are – the food court, the restrooms, your favorite stores, etc..

But what about the map? Most malls have big maps near the entrances so you can navigate to what you’re looking for, rather than having to find it on your own. Meta for business had no such navigation feature until fairly recently when they created Meta Business Suite. Although Business Suite involves yet another user interface for managing your business, its purpose is to provide a good starting point for whatever business task you want to accomplish. It has prominent links for the most common tasks and a menu of other tools you might want to jump to easily.

What are the main anchors?

The mall analogy works for me (and I happen to be a person who likes shopping malls), so I’ll keep it going a bit.

Just as malls have major anchor stores, Meta for business has various tools that could be described as “anchor.” These are the ones you frequent most often. Which tools are your anchors will depend a bit on what type of business you have and what features you are most interested in employing. Some very commonly used anchors are:

• Your business page
• Meta Ads Manager (the full-featured advertising tool)
• Meta Events Manager (for tracking user activity on your website or mobile app)
• Audiences (for creating audiences to advertise to – or exclude)
• Business Settings (for controlling access)
• Inbox (for messages & post comment admin)
• Account Quality (to learn about any problems related to policy compliance you might be having)

If you have an ecommerce business, you might want to add Meta Commerce Manager to that list. Also, (as I mentioned before) you might consider using Meta Business Suite as your primary entrance point for navigating the maze of tools. Or you could simply use it for functions like answering messages and comments in your inbox, seeing insights, or scheduling posts.

Understanding basic business structure & hierarchy

Most business owners understand the concept of having a Facebook “page” for their business. It’s a special page where they can give information about their products and/or services, as well as engage with the public. It’s also a necessary component of paid advertising. (Some people call their personal Facebook a “page,” but that’s incorrect terminology. Your personal side is only called your “profile.”)

There is a different entity than a business page, however, and it’s very important to understand. As a person on Facebook, you can create an entity called a “business,” which is a container-like feature for organizing and sharing access to your various business assets, such as pages, pixels, ad accounts, and much more. This entity is sometimes referred to as a “business manager” or “business account.” This entity can be created by going to www.Business.Facebook.com while logged into your personal Facebook account.

You can certainly have a business page without creating the “business” entity, but the business entity is very useful. It’s a necessity in some cases – especially ones that involve granting various levels of access to employees or marketing agencies.

In the optimal configuration, your business will be established with the container entity, and all of your business-related assets will be in it. The container itself will be the owner of your Facebook business page(s).

To learn more about the business entity and structure, click here.

Using bookmarks

You might be content to use Meta Business Suite as your entry point for all business-related tasks. There’s nothing wrong with that approach. But if you’re like me, you’ll want to employ some bookmarks in your browser too. I like to jump around as quickly as possible, so I’ve added bookmarks in Chrome to take me directly to the tools I use most often, which include: Business Settings, Ads Manager, Events Manager, Meta Business Suite, Meta Commerce Manager, some Facebook groups, and my Facebook Business Page.

In Chrome, you can create folders for your bookmarks. This allows you to have a large number of bookmarks easily accessible and organized in the way that works best for you. On my Windows computer, holding down Control and clicking a bookmarks folder opens up every bookmark in that folder in a different tab. This is a feature that speeds up my work and saves me time every day.

Switching profiles (ala the New Pages Experience)

As I mentioned above, your personal side of Facebook is called your “profile,” not your “personal page.” But true to form for Meta, they created another confusing structure. Now, your Facebook pages also have a “profile.” This means you can use Facebook as your business, sort of like it’s its own person. It can have its own news feed, join groups, among other things. (It can’t send friend requests, though.)

Tip: If you are jumping around to various business-related tools and have trouble finding the feature you need, check to see which profile you are currently using. The profile you are using (be it your personal or business page) affects what you see and the features you can access.

In closing

Using Meta platforms to promote your business can be very, very frustrating. The learning curve is huge, and the ground under you is always moving. I believe it is actually impossible to completely master and memorize. It would be like trying to memorize how a plate of spaghetti is arranged in detail. But having a system for navigation will make things much easier. It’s not fun to be spending twenty minutes looking for that screen that you saw a week ago and then not being able to find it again.

I hope this article was helpful to you. Thanks for reading.

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