Separate Personal From Public Using Facebook Business Manager

Facebook pages have become one of the most important ways for public agencies to connect with their constituents. But for all of their communication benefits, Facebook pages present a big challenge for those who function as administrators: how do you keep your personal life private while maintaining a public page? Before we tackle this issue, let’s take a moment to understand why it exists.

Why Is This An Issue?

Facebook was founded on the principle of real identity, meaning people should be identifiable online and should not hide behind anonymous handles. While this thinking has evolved, the platform still puts a heavy emphasis on the ability of users to know who it is they are communicating with. In practice, this means one profile per person, and all pages must be tied to personal profiles representing real users.

Since you need a real profile to create a page, and you need to be friends with someone to make them an administrator on your page, many people find themselves in the awkward position of having to expose their personal lives in a professional setting. Let’s be real, your teammates might be fantastic, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you want them to see just how often you post about your dogs.

What You Shouldn't Do And Why

The most common, and riskiest, workaround we see here at Social Media Archive (Formerly ArchiveSocial) is for agencies to create dummy profiles to manage their Facebook pages. On the surface, it seems like an easy solution. The dummy profile can be set up as the administrator for all pages within the agency allowing for easier page management. No one feels like their privacy is at risk. No friending your boss either!

It’s easy to see why so many government agencies are tempted by this method to manage their Facebook presence. However, this approach can quickly turn into a huge headache for your agency. Facebook actively looks for fake profiles and shuts them down when they find them. If this happens, then your agency could lose access to that page and not be able to get it back.

Another issue we’ve seen with dummy profiles is that it increases the risk of losing access to the page, even if Facebook doesn’t terminate the dummy profile. We’ve seen situations where a dummy profile was used to manage a page and the employee who set it up ‘went rogue’ (i.e., changed the password and quit) essentially holding the associated government page hostage.

What You Should Do

With all of the risks associated with dummy profiles, what is the best way to manage Facebook pages across an agency while keeping your personal and professional lives separate?

We recommend using Facebook Business Manager. Facebook Business Manager allows you to manage your pages without having to friend your co-workers. While it was originally designed as a way for companies to manage ad campaigns, we’ve seen many government agencies effectively use it as a way to protect employee privacy and maintain control in the event of employee turnover.

Facebook Business Manager helps circumvent one of the more uncomfortable aspects of managing professional pages: having to friend your colleagues to set them up as admins or editors on the page. When you set up Business Manager, you use your personal profile and invite your collaborators via their work emails (not through their profiles). Collaborators are then able to verify themselves to Facebook via their own personal profiles, but their profiles are not exposed to each other or you. Best of all, the initial setup is really easy and takes just a few minutes. It’s also easy to add and remove users as needed.

Setting up Business Manager takes just a few minutes. First, go to business.facebook.com and sign in using your normal Facebook profile. Then, search for your page and enter your name and work email. Once your page is claimed you’ll go through a short onboarding flow and at the end be able to add more users and choose their permissions levels. Setting up Facebook Business Manager for the Social Media Archive page took about five minutes, including adding coworkers.

The Take Aways

• Facebook requires real people connected to Pages
• Use of Dummy Profiles is risky as they can be shut down without warning
• If you want an extra layer between your Personal Facebook Profile and a Page, use Business Manager