The Facebook Business Manager is a powerful tool: it can help businesses to manage a lot of things and accomplish many kinds of activities, but it is not very popular. In fact, it has been around for a while (it was launched in 2014), but it raised some awareness only recently, after a lot of improvements and the introduction of new features. At Wiredmark, we use it every day mainly to manage Facebook pages and advertising accounts for our clients, and we find it very useful, even though a few things could certainly be improved. Let’s see what it is and what we can do with it.
What is the Facebook Business Manager
The Business Manager is kept separated from the standard view of Facebook users, something like a private room, with advanced functionalities for advanced users, such as businesses in need of managing different accounts and pages. All the actions can be performed in this room, but they still interact with the main area. The web or marketing agency is the perfect example of a typical Business Manager user: agencies like us have to manage a lot of different pages and advertising accounts, and during the day we switch from a page to another like platforms in Sonic the Hedgehog.
With the Business Manager we can avoid this back and forth, and we can manage all the pages and monitor all the campaign with a single tool, but that’s not the end of it: we are a team, and sometimes I need help from my colleagues to manage a page or tweak an advertising campaign, but thanks to the Business Manager this is not a problem: we can all be added in the Business Manager and the administrator can decide to whom a certain page or advertising account will be assigned.
The Business Manager allows us to keep the personal stuff separated from the business.
The structure of Facebook Business Manager
Think about a virtual agency: you will have a CEO, a few directors, employees, and customers. The CEO is the person to whom the Business Manager should be associated, as it is unlikely they leave the company. One of the directors is probably in charge of social media, so they will have admin access to the Business Manager as well. The director works with some colleagues, who are in charge of one or more pages, according to their workflow. That’s what Business Manager allows you to do.
Important thing to keep in mind: you can activate Business Manager only if you have at least one ad account, that’s why we recommend it’s the CEO. Obviously, you can invite other admins and give limited access to partners, for example when you are working with another agency on one project in particular.
Should you use it?
Altough it is not perfect, Facebook Business Manager is still very useful, and if you do marketing campaigns with Facebook, you should certainly consider this tool, especially if you fall in one of these categories:
An agency in charge of pages and ads for multiple clients;
A big agency with multiple clients and agents;
A business, no matter how big, that collaborates with other businesses on common projects;
An e-commerce with massive re-targeting campaigns active;
A website that needs to share a custom audience;
A business that runs ads in different countries with different currencies and time zones.
However, the Business Manager is not only pros, but also cons, which you should consider before taking a decision:
You can’t remove the main account;
The knowledge base is actually quite poor;
Some procedures are too complex;
Some well-known bugs stay unresolved for long time.
What can you do with pages and ad accounts?
There are three actions you can do for pages and ad accounts (called assets):
Add an asset: if your business already owns this page and you want to claim it, you can select this option and input the ID or the URL to see it in the Business Manager.
Request access to an asset: if you are an agency and you work for a client, you can request access to their assets with this option, and they will receive a notification. You’ll see the resource in your Business Manager as soon as your client accepts the request.
Create a new asset: if it does not exist yet, you can create it. It will automatically appear in the Business Manager, and your business will be the owner.
You can also assign a Pixel to an analyst or an editor, who will be able to monitor it and make changes.
If you are an active business on social media, Facebook Business Manager is a top tool, and with consistent improvements ahead, it is doomed to become necessary.
Your digital strategy is distributed on a lot of channels: corporate blog, search engine optimisation, social media, and more. It is a stressful situation, and a minimum distraction can be a problem. You are always careful to what you post on social media on behalf of your brand, as you are representing your business, and if something goes wrong, your reputation does too, and profits with it. That’s when you learn how to manage a crisis on social media.
Some people may argue that when a brand fails on social media, they only get critics for a couple of days and then everything is back to normal, but is not always true. You might remember a late 2017 video posted by Dove on social media, because ti got viral due to an apparently racist nature:
Indignation came immediately, but it seemed vanished after a couple of days, with people who still went to their favourite supermarket and bought a bottle of Dove. However, according to The Drum, the negative sentiment increased by 50% even way after the ad was removed from the internet.
The truth is if you don’t know how to manage a crisis on social media, you do take some economical damage. We are sure Unilever had no intention to post a racist ad, but a lack of common sense was enough to trigger people’s rage. Unfortunately, a crisi may happen at all times, and when you choose to push your brand on social media, you know it is part of the deal, and you have to be prepared to handle it or let it handle to your social media manager.
So, how to manage a crisis on social media? There are four steps to take, let’s see.
Listen
The first thing you can do is listening to the reasons why people are so angry at you: everything you share on the internet is subject to the judgment of different people with different experiences and background, so something that seems acceptable for you, maybe is not acceptable for everyone. Do not make the mistake of underestimating this aspect thinking you know your target well, because you don’t and you never will: culture and society change over time.
So, in this phase you have to understand what led your audience to have a negative reaction, because you will need to prove you actually listen to them, otherwise you will end up digging an even bigger hole.
Acknowledge
Once you know how the misunderstanding happened, you should recognise the mistake and genuinely say sorry for the bad feelings you triggered, and then you can tell your side of the story, and explain what you meant with an official note.
The purpose of this step is to re-build the empathy between you and your audience. Do not expect the effect would be immediate and that everyone will respond positively to it, but it will help to cool down the huge wave of heat that is burning your reputation.
Resolve
The next question is: how can you possibly deter your audience from unfollowing you, or worse, lose your customers for good?
Trying to minimise the incident and sweep it under the carpet won’t help for the same reason we stated in the introduction of this post: people seem to easily forget and forgive, but they don’t. So, the best way to deal with a social media fail is posting an apology. You may argue that not everyone accepts apologies, and it is true, but if you followed the previous steps, the odds in your favour will significantly increase, but what’s more important is the very fact you are actually doing something to fix the mistake. What should you do, in particular? Let’s see the next step.
Compensate
Nothing better than a real compensation can fix the broken heart of your customers. In fact, an apology followed by a compensation doubles its effectiveness. Compensation is your trump card, as it can turn a fail into a win. You can offer a discount, a limited time promotion, a special version of one of your product, and so on.
So, now not only you know how to manage a crisis on social media, but also how to reverse it and even get an opportunity out of it!
Today, I am going to talk about one of the most powerful social media marketing tools: the Facebook Pixel.
The Facebook Pixel is a Javascript code snippet that allows you to monitor the activities users perform when they land on your website. Many of the businesses that get in touch with us to get help on Facebook do advertise their content by themselves, however, the vast majority of them does not use a Facebook Pixel or has never heard of it, so it often is the first thing we do. To give you an idea of its potential, just think about those times when you visit a website and then you go on Facebook and find advertisements with the same content you just saw on the other website: that’s when (part of) the magic of the Pixel happens! It does not have any effect on search engine optimisation, but it is equally effective.
Main functions of the Facebook Pixel
The Facebook Pixel looks like a simple monitoring tool, which it is indeed, but because of its nature, it offers a lot possibilities of use, thanks to its strict link with Facebook. In fact, you may use it for:
Creation of events and custom conversation, by tracking the actions users accomplish on your website and picking the most relevant;
Create custom audiences, so you can use them later, perhaps for re-marketing campaigns or to show your ads to people who already interacted with your website, so they are more likely to buy;
Create lookalike audiences, which, as the name suggets, will allow you to show your ads to new audiences, but still similar to the original ones;
Make remarketing campaigns for your e-commerce for users who did not accomplish the action desired (e.g.: they added a product to the cart, but did not purchase it);
Optimise your funnel with a degree of precision that would be impossible to reach otherwise;
Grab the attention of your target thanks to the knowledge of their most recondite preferences.
Most important thing: the Facebook Pixel does not only monitor the actions of people who get to your website via Facebook advertising, but also those who come from other sources, like other websites, search engines, or simple direct traffic, and this is the reason why you should always install the Facebook Pixel, even though you are not planning to use it at the moment, so that you still get useful reports.
Facebook Pixel is cross-device
Another valuable feature is the fact that the Facebook Pixel is able to distinguish the device a user is using when they go on your website. Basically, if you are logged on Facebook both on your laptop and your smartphone, and you visit the same website on both devices, Facebook knows it was you and will show to the website owner that the same person visited their website twice (obviously your name won’t appear anywhere).
This feature might be used to test the effectiveness of your responsive design: if you notice that users visit your website from mobile, but they complete the purchase when they access from their PC, it means your website has got a bad UX design on mobile, and it must be improved in order to increase conversions.
The events
When you will be able to master your Facebook Pixel menu (it won’t take you longer than a few hours), you will find that you can track different kinds of actions on your website, which are called “events”.
There are three kinds of events:
Standard events: simple events like page views or adding to cart, they are easy to customise with a lot of different parametres like numeric value, currency, content type, content ID, and so on. Of course, a little knowledge of the CMS you use is necessary.
Dynamic events: events that happen without exiting from the landing page, like clicking on a button that triggers an AJAX event, or the scrolling to a certain point, the mouse passing over an element, and so on.
Custom events: they work just like standard events, but you can customise their name and parametres, very useful to get data on particular actions.
Monitor, analyse, improve!
As you can see, a Facebook Pixel can tell you a lot of things about your website and your strategy. Keep monitoring the results, analyse them, and make changes to improve your funnel.
You may have noticed that chatbots are on the rise: a lot of businesses use them in many different ways, and not only on Facebook, but also on external pages, such as a website. Basically, you can have Facebook Messenger on your website. Facebook Messenger, in fact, allows the integrations with third party apps, in order to have a bot that gives “intelligent” answers to users who engage a conversation.
Now that the Customer Chat plugin is available for everyone, third party apps are no longer necessary, so users will be able to use Facebook Messenger without leaving the website.
If you use a chatbot, and it plays an important role in your strategy, this update is critical, as it will increase the engagement with your visitors, and you will be able to profile them (GDPR what!?).
How to configure Customer Chat plugin
If you access to the official plugin page, you will be able to add Facebook Messenger on your website in a few steps. Alternatively, you can go on your page and access to configuration options on Page Settings –> Messenger Platform –> Customer Chat Plugin.
On the first step, you will be able to choose the language of your plugin and write a welcome message.
Clicking Next, you will be able to set up the response time and tweak the appearance. Make sure you choose some colours that match with those on your website.
Now, you will finally get the code to implement on your website right after the <body> tag in order to activate the chat on the first access. The code consists in a JS script in embedded in a container.
This plugin offers a lot of possibilities for the integration of Facebook Messenger on your website, and it is particularly recommended for some kinds of websites like e-commerce.
How to add Facebook Messenger on WordPress
As you can imagine, on WordPress everything gets easier, as it does not require any particular developing skills or programming language, but it only takes a few clicks.
So, if you are among the lucky ones who have a WordPress website, adding Facebook Messenger to it will be much easier.
All you have to do is downloading and installing the plugin Messenger Customer Chat for WordPress.
After installing the plugin, you just have to go on the new menu voice named Messenger Chat and input your Facebook fanpage’s ID and add your domain in the whitelist, which can be done by going on your page’s settings, into the Messenger Platform menu and inserting your website’s URL in the text input area in the section Whitelisted Domains, and then confirming with a click on the Save button.
That’s it! You installed Facebook Messenger on your WordPress website!
The advantages of Facebook Messenger on your website
E-commerce websites, in fact, are probably those who will get the best out of this Facebook Messenger integration.
Messaging is an increasing trend, and people spend more and more time every day on messaging apps. According to Flurry Analytics, the time spent on social media and messaging apps in 2017 increased by 400% since the previous year!
Businesses do understand that they need to communicate more directly to their customers, and the answer is right there in the chat apps.
E-mails are spam, text messages are too short, and phone calls are too slow, but chat messages are just perfect.
Other interesting statistics say that 85% of mobile app users only use five apps regularly. In other words, users prefer doing everything in the same digital environment, an environment that they know and trust, and it would be unnatural to get them out of there.
Thanks to the Customer Chat plugin, the user experience will be more captivating.
That being said, it is opportune to remember that Messenger is not your territory, and Facebook may change the rules of the game at any time, putting a limit to your efforts. However, it is undoubtfully easier to convince people to use Facebook Messenger than your own app.
Looking for an easy set up?
Although we described the process to implement the Customer Chat plugin on your website, we know it could still be a hard task. If you need help to set it up on your website, we can do it for you. We will take care of generating the code, customise its appearance and install the code at the right place on your website.
As you can imagine, on WordPress everything gets easier, as it does not require any particular developing skills or programming language, but it only takes a few clicks.