Meta Business Manager vs. Meta Business Suite
Meta / facebook has two business management interfaces: The Meta Business Manager and the Meta Business Suite!
In this article, we briefly explain the difference between Meta Business Manager and Meta Business Suite for our customers.
What are we actually talking about here?
There are two management interfaces in Meta / facebook that companies can use to manage their organization on facebook and instagram and to place advertisements.
You can find the Meta Business Manager at: https://business.facebook.com/settings/info (for a deep dive into the most important pages in the Business Manager, you can also check out the article Meta Business Manager – the most important links / pages )
The Meta Business Suite, on the other hand, can be accessed at the URL https://business.facebook.com/latest/home.
For visual learners, here is a comparison of the two surfaces:
What is the difference? Business Manager vs. Business Suite?
From our point of view, there are two explanations to the question “What is the difference between Meta Business Manager and Meta Business Suite?” One of the two versions is very polemical and even a little paranoid. The other version is much more factual.
The polemic explanation: Business Manager vs. Business Suite
The Meta Group divides its corporate customers into two categories: small-time businesses and enterprise customers. The latter need complex interfaces to fulfill requirements in the areas of role and rights management, billing or collaboration with service providers so that they can invest millions of advertising euros.
And then there are small businesses that really only need to see their content and have to be reminded again and again to spend money on advertising because their organic reach is simply no longer sufficient. You could also say that there is an interface for serious companies (Business Manager) and one for gullible idiots (Business Suite). Because: Although you can also place ads in the Business Suite (and thus spend money), advertisers in the Suite only have a fraction of the options available to them that other companies have in Ads Manager (Business Manager).
Therefore: Be careful when choosing the facebook management interface!
The factual explanation: Business Manager vs. Business Suite
In facebook there are two “management consoles” for companies, page operators and advertising companies: The Business Manager and the Business Suite. The Business Suite is primarily intended as an introduction to the management of facebook pages and instagram accounts. You can plan and moderate content and view a few statistics on the performance of the content. This interface is very simplified/reduced in many places so that creators are not directly overwhelmed by the complexity of the entire meta world. The Business Manager, including the Event Manager and Ads Manager, is responsible for the entire complexity of the meta world. It contains numerous configurations for security, authorizations, brand safety, technology, tracking, etc. – This is a world that larger companies with several employees and high turnover actually have to / want to immerse themselves in.
But: Every company that associates the social networks facebook and instagram with money should know and be able to use both interfaces.
And: In our view, the meta Group is deliberately making life a little more difficult than it needs to be for its users / customers in two places:
- The transition from the Business Suite to the Business Manager is made very difficult for the user. In very few places are there hints with the tenor “There are even more settings for your company here!”
- meta also lets its customers place ads via the interface. However, the interface for creating advertising campaigns is very streamlined (compared to the meta Ads Manager). This means that the customer does not have too many options for managing their budgets and reaching new target groups. In addition, the advertising from the suite is designed to keep users within the networks with few options to refer to their own websites and stores or to create completely new creatives.
In which interface should I work as a company?
At THE BIG C Agency, we traditionally answer the question “Should I work in the Business Manager or the Business Suite?” with“In both!“
As soon as we join in, the meta Business Manager is priority number 1! It is important that the company exists, that all assets (pages, accounts) are assigned to this company, that an ad account exists and that tracking can be implemented via the Event Manager! An additional word of warning: Only place ads via the Ads Manager!
This is followed by work in the meta Business Suite. This is particularly useful in the area of content creation. If you don’t want to pay for an external social media management tool, you can find many important functions for content work in social networks here: Content analysis, moderation of posts and interaction with followers as well as a tool for planning content.
Content managers in particular will probably find what they are looking for primarily in the Business Suite!