What is a business manager?
A business manager is the platform-side container that owns a brand's accounts, pages and ad assets and controls which people and partner organisations can access them.
Also called Meta Business Suite, TikTok Business Center.
Each major platform runs its own version — Meta Business Suite, TikTok Business Center, LinkedIn's Company Page admin roles, YouTube brand accounts — and the model is broadly consistent: assets sit inside the container, people and partners are granted roles against them, and the container is what actually establishes ownership.
It is the correct unit for a governance review. Auditing accounts one by one misses the partner grants, and it is partner grants — agencies, contractors, former vendors — that most often turn out to be open years after the work ended.
A brand whose accounts sit outside any business manager, held in an individual's personal login, has no ownership record to fall back on when that individual leaves.
Related terms
- Social media governanceSocial media governance is the set of controls that establishes who owns a brand's social accounts, who can reach them and how that access is granted and removed — as distinct from managing what gets published on them.
- Ghost accessGhost access is a live grant on an account held by someone who should no longer have it — a former employee, a finished agency, a contractor whose engagement ended.
- SCIMSCIM is the open standard that lets an identity provider push user accounts and group membership into another system automatically, so joiners and leavers propagate without anyone doing it by hand.
- Joiner-mover-leaverJoiner-mover-leaver is the access control process covering the three points at which a person's access should change — when they join, when they change role, and when they leave.