With a litany of litigation and legislation pending against Facebook, it seems it’s open season on the social media giant. After reading Chris Hughes’ opinion piece in the New York Times, I figure now is as good a time as any to post three improvements I’d like to see in Facebook Business Manager.

For perspective, I’m a corporate officer at a publicly traded broadcast company in the United States. My thoughts below are the direct result of the pain points we’ve experienced as a media company attempting to bring a central structure to our network of Facebook Pages.

Nested page hierarchy

This is a big one, especially for media companies. The broadcast company I work for operates in 27 markets each maintaining pages for several (if not dozens) of unique brands and media personalities. It’s not uncommon for one of our markets to have 5–10 radio station pages, along with pages for each of our major personalities, podcasts, and community events.

It’d be amazing to have the ability to cleanly nest all of our pages for easier management. Admittedly, Facebook has set up something close to this with Locations, but that applies more appropriately to retail businesses with multiple stores in multiple markets.

For media companies, we often have multiple brands (radio/TV stations) in one city each staffed by any number of on-air personalities all of which have good reason to maintain separate Facebook Pages. In my mind, I’d like a setup that would allow me to at least nest pages by market > brand > personalities. Ideally, this would give us the option to assign permissions in batches based on those hierarchies. From there, I’d also like the option to publish content across multiple pages in a market.

Roll-up and audience overlap insights

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found out about a Facebook post that went viral too late. I’d love a dashboard that would show me the top performing posts and pages across my network. I can also envision this being helpful in identifying inappropriate or abusive behavior more efficiently.

Beyond that, how great would it be to pull audience reports across your entire network of Facebook pages (or across individual markets)? Better yet, how about a report showing the relative overlap of audience members across multiple pages in your business? A better understanding of how our audience spans across multiple brands would open a whole new world of strategic thinking.

Groups

I understand why Facebook has intentionally kept groups out of the business ecosystem. But some sort of business group would be an amazing way for media personalities and brands to communicate in a multi-directional fashion. I can envision media companies forming groups to share and discover news tips, plan community events, or simply foster a more meaningful connection with our audiences.