LinkedIn® Business Manager is a free central management layer for organizations that need to control access to LinkedIn Pages, advertising accounts and the people or businesses working on them.
For an established organization, the important question is not simply whether Business Manager exists. It is whether centralizing access there gives you better control than managing everybody directly from individual Pages and accounts.
What Business Manager changes
Business Manager lets an organization bring Pages and ad accounts into one environment, invite people into the organization and then assign access to the specific assets they need.
It uses two levels of permission: what a person can do within Business Manager itself, and what that person can do on an individual Page or ad account.
When it becomes useful
Business Manager becomes particularly useful when several people manage LinkedIn assets, the organization operates multiple Pages or ad accounts, staff access changes regularly, or external agencies and partners need controlled access.
A very small organization with one Page and one or two administrators may not gain much from adding another management layer immediately. The decision should be based on governance complexity, not on adopting a feature simply because it is available.
Claiming and requesting access are different
An organization can claim a Page it owns into Business Manager. It can also request access to a Page owned by another organization. Where both organizations use Business Manager, partnership sharing provides a cleaner organization-to-organization model.
A Page can only be claimed by one Business Manager, so ownership should be considered before somebody clicks through the setup process. If the Page is already attached to Business Manager in a way you cannot resolve, use the Business Manager Page-access troubleshooting Guide.
Business integrations
Business Manager can also connect with supported third-party marketing and reporting platforms. These integrations can allow organizations to use LinkedIn data within external reporting, analytics and measurement systems.
You can review the integrations currently available to your organization under Business Manager → Settings → Business integrations. At the time this lesson was updated, the available integrations included TapClicks, Funnel, Swydo, Power My Analytics, Adverity, Supermetrics and Windsor.ai. Availability can change, so check Business Manager for the current list.
Only connect an integration your organization actively uses, and review who will have access to the resulting data before approving the connection.
Expert Tip
Don’t connect integrations simply because they’re available. Treat third-party access to your LinkedIn business data like any other system permission – connect it for a defined purpose and remove it when it is no longer required.
Your task
Ask three questions: How many people currently need access to your LinkedIn assets? How often does that access change? Do outside organizations need access? If the answer to more than one indicates growing complexity, Business Manager deserves serious consideration.