My Facebook Usability Rant: The Admin Nightmare Agencies Can’t Escape

For agencies, working with clients on Meta’s platforms isn’t just about strategy, creative, or performance. It’s about navigating a maze of administrative layers, permissions, legacy systems, half-finished product transitions, and contradictory interfaces that seem to have evolved without any coherent model for how agencies actually work. What should be a straightforward professional relationship between an agency and a client often becomes an ongoing exercise in frustration, risk management, and wasted time.

At the center of this mess is a foundational flaw that has never been properly addressed: Meta still cannot—or will not—separate a person’s professional access from their personal identity.

The Inescapable Personal Account Problem

The most indefensible issue with Facebook administration is that business access is permanently tethered to a personal Facebook profile. Not a professional identity. Not an agency credential. A personal account.

This means that if you want to manage a business page, an ad account, a pixel, or a catalog, you must maintain a personal Facebook presence. There is no supported way to exist purely as a professional operator. For many of us, this is not an inconvenience—it’s a philosophical and practical problem.

Like many agency owners and consultants, I wanted to delete Facebook years ago. I had no interest in maintaining a personal profile, sharing personal information, or participating in the platform socially. But clients needed their pages managed. Campaigns needed to be launched. Pixels needed troubleshooting. And Meta’s answer was simple: keep your personal account, or you can’t do your job.

So instead of deleting Facebook, I was forced to keep a hollow shell of a personal profile alive—one that exists solely as a keycard to access client businesses. That alone should be a red flag in any modern enterprise platform.

Business Manager: A Partial Fix That Introduced New Problems

Meta’s response to agency chaos was Meta Business Manager, which was supposed to centralize assets, permissions, and relationships. In theory, it does. In practice, it adds another abstraction layer on top of an already broken identity model.

Business Manager still depends entirely on personal accounts underneath. When a personal account is restricted, locked, hacked, flagged, or disabled—even temporarily—every business asset tied to it can be affected. Agencies routinely lose access to client ad accounts because a staff member’s personal profile was flagged for reasons completely unrelated to the business.

The risk profile here is staggering. A single human account becomes a single point of failure for revenue-generating systems across multiple client organizations.

A Fragmented Ecosystem of Tools That Don’t Agree With Each Other

Managing Facebook for clients isn’t just one interface. It’s an ecosystem of loosely connected tools that often feel like they were built by different teams who never spoke to each other.

There’s Business Manager, Ads Manager, Commerce Manager, Events Manager, Page Settings, Account Quality, Business Settings, and now Meta Business Suite—each with overlapping responsibilities and different permission models. Some settings can only be changed in one place. Others appear in multiple places but behave differently. Error messages are vague, circular, or outright misleading.

Even worse, the UI changes constantly. Options move. Labels change. Entire workflows disappear overnight. Agencies are expected to support clients on platforms where documentation lags reality and yesterday’s tutorial is already obsolete.

Agencies Carry the Liability, Not Meta

When something goes wrong—and it often does—it’s the agency that pays the price. Clients don’t see Meta’s internal complexity. They see an agency that can’t access the account, lost permissions, or needs the owner to log in again.

Explaining to a client that their ad account is inaccessible because a former employee’s personal Facebook profile was the original admin is not a conversation that inspires confidence. Nor is explaining that Meta support cannot resolve the issue quickly, clearly, or at all.

This puts agencies in an impossible position: responsible for outcomes on systems they don’t control, using identity rules that actively work against professional delegation and governance.

The Broader Meta Problem

This issue isn’t isolated to Facebook. It extends across the entire Meta ecosystem, including Instagram and even WhatsApp integrations. Everything rolls up to Meta Platforms, yet nothing feels unified in a way that respects how agencies and enterprises operate.

Meta has built world-class advertising technology on top of consumer-grade identity assumptions. That mismatch is the root of nearly every administrative headache agencies face.

What Meta Still Gets Wrong

At its core, this isn’t a usability issue—it’s a governance failure. Professional access should be role-based, auditable, transferable, and independent of a person’s social presence. No agency employee should ever have to maintain a personal social account to do their job. No client should risk losing access to their business because of a personal account issue. And no enterprise platform should still rely on this model.

Until Meta fundamentally separates personal identity from professional authorization, agencies will continue to waste time navigating admin purgatory instead of delivering value. And many of us will continue to keep personal Facebook accounts we never wanted—open not by choice, but by force.

That’s not just bad usability. It’s bad platform design.