Why Cannabis Businesses Need To Set Up Meta Business Manager
Social media is a great place for cannabis businesses to connect with their customers and reach new ones, even on platforms like Facebook and Instagram that have anti-cannabis policies. Despite those policies, most cannabis businesses would benefit from having Facebook and Instagram pages — and that means they also need to set up Meta Business Manager.
Meta Business Manager is a backend management system that allows page owners to securely manage their page, including adding and removing access to the page while reducing the risk of a page being hacked.
It’s similar to Meta Business Suite, which is the standard management dashboard for all business pages on Facebook. You’ll spend more time creating content and looking at insights in Meta Business Suite, but Meta Business Suite should not replace Meta Business Manager.
Most businesses create a Meta Business Manager to organize their business assets such as ad imagery. Cannabis businesses can’t run ads on Facebook and Instagram as of August 2023, but it’s still worth creating a Business Manager.
Why? Because it provides a secure way for you to manage who has access to your page.
Typically, a business owner or marketing manager needs complete access to the Facebook and Instagram pages. In general, it’s helpful to have at least two staff employees who have full access to the page to prevent you from losing access to the page. But other people may also need access, such as a budtender who creates Reels for your Instagram page or a digital marketing agency who manages your page or creates content for you.
If you just have one person owning the page, you have less control over what permissions you can grant someone, and you’d need to add their personal pages directly to the page itself.
With Meta Business Manager, you can customize more permissions so that each person only has access to the things they need. For example, if you want to make sure all budtenders have access to messages but you don’t want them to have access to publishing posts on the page or deleting other users, you can do that in Meta Business Manager.
It also makes it easy to remove employees if they leave your business. This is also why we recommend having two full admins, so that if one of those people leaves you don’t lose access to your page altogether.
You can also easily grant access to agencies who may be providing content for your page.
Having a Meta Business Manager also gives you the opportunity to provide more information to Meta about your business, which could help if you need to troubleshoot issues with Meta such as content removed for violating their Community Guidelines or your page getting shut down.
Everyone who is connected to your business’s Facebook page should be added to your Business Manager (with the exception of agencies, who should be requesting access to your page from their Business Manager account), and they should be using their own personal Facebook accounts.
Their personal Facebook accounts won’t be publicly connected to the page, but it does let Meta know that you have real people publishing content and interacting with your audience on the page. This is a major concern for Meta, as they continue to focus on removing bad actors from their platform. Having dummy accounts managing your Facebook page can cause Meta to shut down your page entirely without warning, even if your content does not violate their Community Guidelines.
To learn more about how to use Meta Business Manager for your business, check out Federated Digital Solutions’ guides on how to set up and access your Meta Business Manager and what to do if you lose access to your Meta Business Manager.
If social media is becoming too much of a headache for your cannabis business, Cannabis Digital Solutions can help! We create compliant, engaging social media content for cannabis brands that keep your audience connected with you while following each platform’s ever-changing rules. Reach out to us today to learn more about a partnership!
