Facebook has launched yet another Facebook management platform, with this one, called ‘Facebook Business Suite’, which is focused on making it easier for small businesses to manage their Facebook and Instagram presences from a single platform.
As you can see from the video, the new Business Suite platform incorporates all of your Facebook Page and Instagram profile options into one space, and will be available on desktop or in a new mobile app.
As per Facebook, Business Suite enables users to:
- Save time – Post to Facebook and Instagram at the same time and manage posts in one place to stay connected to both communities.
- Stay up-to-date – Get all of your Facebook and Instagram messages, notifications and alerts in one place so you can stay up to date and respond to all of your customers more easily.
- Business results – See what’s working with Facebook and Instagram insights and learn what your customers are looking for.
So instead of using Pages Manager or Creator Studio, you now have yet another way to stay across all of your Facebook and Instagram business interactions – though this one does cover a lot of functionalities within a single app.
Message management is nothing new – you can get all your messages from Facebook, Messenger and Instagram in Pages Manager already, while Facebook added Facebook/Instagram scheduling to Creator Studio last year.
But then again, the integrated message inbox could be helpful within your workflow.
While the scheduling layout adds another view:
What I like most about Business Suite, however, is the layout of its analytics tab, which makes it a little easier to get a full overview of your Instagram and Facebook performance in one place.
Creator Studio also has analytics displays, but it’s more focused on video post performance, whereas this listing gives you a better, overall comparison of your Facebook and Instagram presence. That’s probably a personal preference, but I do like the layout and simplicity of this format.
And Business Suite may soon have another feature that Pages Manager doesn’t – according to Axios, Facebook is also planning to integrate WhatsApp messaging functionality into the app in the near future. Facebook has been working towards integrating its messaging apps over the past year and a half, and if WhatsApp functionality is indeed added to Business Suite, this would be the first app which enables responses across all three platforms.
So how functional and helpful is it? It depends on what you’re trying to do, but definitely, it does integrate all the key Facebook and Instagram business management tools into one app, and it largely seems to meet its remit of simplifying the various tools into one platform.
Facebook also says that it plans to make Business Suite “the main interface for businesses of all sizes who use Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp”. So it may well be the one to focus on, if you’re looking to establish a central platform for your Facebook/Instagram management.