Facebook's Best Kept Secret: Business Accounts

As November came to a close, I was getting ready to leave my job at UW-Waukesha and I realized something disturbing: I could not transfer our Facebook advertising account to another employee.

Changing the administrative rights on pages and groups was easy. But, as it turns out, Facebook advertising is permanently connected to a user account. You can always add another manager, but you can never transfer your administrative rights. In practice, this means that the last two years of Facebook ad history (creative and analytics reporting) were lost when I left the organization, and any in-process or future campaigns that had already been built needed to be stopped immediately so my company credit card would stop being charged.

This is not how I wanted to leave my organization. I reached out to the Facebook advertising team using a fairly generic form in one of their help sections. I was contacted by Gabe (last name unknown) from Facebook Marketing Solutions. Gabe offered the following advice:

Thanks for reaching out to us. At this time it is not possible to add another user as an admin. You can only add them as a General User. In this case, we recommend creating a new Business Account. We can do this on your behalf if you can provide us with an email address not associated with any facebook accounts, the desired password, and the time zone. This account will not have any ability to add friends but it can be used to manage your Page.

I asked Twitter and Facebook – none of my connections, many of whom manage pages on behalf of organizations, had heard of a business account that acted like a user profile. Is this Facebook’s best kept secret? I gave Gabe the information he asked for, and asked if there was any way I could create a business account on my own. He informed me that only Facebook staff has the ability to create this type of account.

The reasons why any social media manager would want a business account are clear:

• Ability to create one business account that has a shared password that can be used by many team members.
• Ability to provide continuity to Facebook advertising efforts.
• Avoid attaching a company credit card to a personal Facebook account for the purpose of advertising.

Googling “Facebook Business Account” will bring up a variety of information, some of it outdated. The only reference I could find on Facebook’s site explains the account but doesn’t tell you how to create one. If you’d like to create a business account, I’d suggest filling out the form like I did, or you could try contacting the email address that Gabe has been using to contact me, which may or may not work long-term: sales-support+3ei0fir.aeau3y2lqeqb6 AT support DOT facebook DOT com.

Update: Wonderful readers have left comments that don’t make you go through the “back door” like I did. Visit www.facebook.com/business, or go to www.facebook.com/pages without already being logged into Facebook and create a page using the business email you’d like associated with your new business account.

If you have any luck with this strategy, let me know. Since I’m starting social media from scratch at my new position, I’ll definitely be requesting a business account.

Update: Just prior to receiving these suggestions I went the route of filling out the contact form within the Facebook Ads help section, and I had a new business account set up within just a few days at my new company. The account works well. My only complaint/frustration is that it doesn’t have built in search. So, if you’d like to visit another page (perhaps to like that page as your page), you need to type in the page URL directly.

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