Should your Business have a Facebook Page or a Facebook Group?
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posted in Resourceson Monday, January 3rd, 2011
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Facebook continues to confuse us all with its numerous business options, including Pages, Groups and most recently Community Pages. Let’s dissect them to see which one your business should be using.
If you don’t want to go through all the hoopla and just want the results straight up, here’s the verdict in a nutshell: Pages for businesses, groups for short-term intimate interaction, and community pages for user-generated interaction (versus company managed interaction).
Right, so now the meat.
Here are the crucial features and differentiating factors presented in an easy to scan table:
Feature
Facebook Page
Facebook Group
Custom (vanity) URLs
yes
no
Mass Messaging
no
yes
Friend/Member Limit
no limit
No limit
Indexed by search engines
yes
no
Inbox messaging
no
yes; cap at 5000
Event updates/messages
no
yes
Metrics/Insights/Analytics
yes
no
Walls Discussion tabs
yes
yes
Extra Apps
yes
no
Promotion via Facebook Ads
yes
no
Publish to News feed
yes
yes
Geo-location for posts
yes
no
Public vs Private
public
privacy settings available
Moderation
manual
manual
RSS feeds of blogs
yes
No
Now let’s see what these actually mean for your business.
If I wanted to share photos of my toddler with my family, I’d form a Facebook group, mark it private and visible to selected people and upload images there for the whole family to see and coo over. And I have.
But if I wanted to share business information and get people to know about my company, host discussions around my topic and possibly hire me for work, I’d form a Facebook Page because of its public nature, searchability factor and promotion options.
A Facebook Page:
- Provides you a custom URL with your business name (e.g. Facebook.com/yourbiz)
- Is indexed by Google and other major search engines
- Helps to build a brand
- Allows people to “Like” and virally share it’s content
- Is public and visible
- Publishes status updates in the news feed of members
- Allows members to easily share updates and links
- Allows creation and syncing of Facebook Events
- Allows import of your blog feed (or any RSS feed) as a status update
- Provides detailed user and interaction analysis and insights
- Can be promoted with Facebook Ads
- Allows posts to be visible to members of a certain geographic location
- Allows the addition of Facebook apps to the page
- Can have custom tabs for visitors to land on
- Can have custom info targeted to specific visitors (e.g. fan-only content vs. public content)
While it’s true that a Facebook Group enables you to send mass messages to your members, you can only do that for up to 5000 members. Also Facebook Events can do the same (and better) job with regard to event updates and invites.
So if you’re looking to use Facebook for business, don’t hesitate: you need a Facebook Page, not a Group.
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