Facebook Pages v. Facebook Groups - Which is right for you?

Regular readers of our blog know that we've been promoting Facebook as a great social media site for small businesses to establish a presence (here and here). Traditionally, there have been two different ways of doing this - through a Page or a Group.

With the rapid growth of the Facebook community that is upon us, we recommend creating a Facebook Page for your business, as it gives you more depth, versatility, and interactivity with your customers.

Here is a summary of the differences between a Facebook Page and a Group (from InsideFacebook.com):

Facebook Pages — Facebook “Pages” (that’s with a capital “P”) were created to give businesses their own profile on Facebook. In fact, originally, the code that made up a Facebook “Page” appeared to be almost exactly the same as that which generated user profile pages.

Pages give your business or brand an identity on Facebook. With a Page, those interested and following your brand can become “fans”, and when they do so, all their friends will see this. You can store photos, videos, information about your company, and custom applications on your Page. All activity on Pages gets posted back to your Mini Feed for all your friends to see. Click here for a detailed overview on what fields you can store on a Facebook Page.

Groups — Groups on Facebook are similar to Pages, but are meant to be built around a group of people rather than an individual business or brand. Groups have no “become a fan” feature, and do not share as much information with users’ friends as users interact.

More information about the differences between Pages & Groups, see this article on The Goggles Do Nothing Blog.

The Facebook Page is therefore a more powerful marketing tool. When your followers sign-up as fans, you can easily send them updates. You (and your fans) can upload photos and videos, creating more content on a daily basis. There is also a discussion board and new features are being added all the time.

So if you are on Facebook and you have a business, ramp up your marketing efforts and add a Page today!