Groups or Pages?
Both ‘Facebook Pages’ and ‘Facebook Groups’ have similar features and capabilities in promoting your event, business, services or organization. Either option will allow you to promote activities, host discussions, have a wall, have photos, profile info, discussion forums and have members, with that affiliation optionally displayed to a member’s ‘friends’ (creating a viral marketing effect). They are, however, slightly different:
Groups
You can create a Facebook group for just about anything. They can be used to promote a product, an event, a service or a business. They can be serious discussion forums, simple photo galleries, or video libraries. Groups are used primarily to communicate with other like-minded individuals, offering easy tools to send updates and messages to the entire group.
As the creator of a group, you gain control over which features of the group are enabled, and whether it is visible to all members of Facebook, or is closed and visible only to invited Facebook members. Facebook groups are never visible to non-Facebook users.
Groups – Pros
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Facebook users are familiar with groups.
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The group owner can send messages to group members.
- Members can post on the wall, start discussions, post photos and events.
- You can invite members of the group to events, and have RSVP guest lists.
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They are marginally easier to set up and manage than pages.
Groups – Cons
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Groups are visible only to Facebook members.
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Groups cannot have extra applications added to them.
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You generally have to visit a group regularly and to use the messaging feature to keep discussions flowing.
Pages
You can create a Facebook page for any business, organization or service. Unlike groups which have members, and which are only visible to logged-in Facebook users, most of a Facebook page can be visible on the wider internet to those without a Facebook account, and the page can have ‘fans’.
The major downfall of pages is that you can send updates to fans, but these will only be displayed on the side of a user’s homepage when they log in, rather than appearing in their in-box. This means they might slip thru the cracks more easily.
Pages – Pros
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Can be visible on the wider internet to non-Facebook members (although only Facebook members can interact with them).
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You can add applications, blog, RSS, another discussion board etc.
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Facebook presents you with visitor statistics to let you know how many visitors your pages are getting.
Pages – Cons
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‘Updates’ sent to those who decide to be ‘fans’ of your page are lower-key than messages to group ‘members’.
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Facebook users are less familiar with pages than they are with groups and pages can be harder to find for that reason.
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Visitors still need to be a member of Facebook if they want to join in discussions on your page message board.
Bottom line is both are good options. We think of it this way. If you are a non-profit it might be better to be a group, or promoting events via groups might be a better fit simply because you can email your group members. If you are a business promoting a service or product, then pages might be a better long-term fit, so people can see your information even if they’re not Facebook members, and they can become fans.
Frankly, we think Facebook should offer the same services for both – and combine them – since it just confuses Facebook users as to what is a page and what is a group.
posted by Nattana Johnson, Owner, MGC
