One of my clients asked me to clarify the differences between Facebook Groups and Pages, therefore I thought it would be handy to share this with you too!
As many of you will have noticed, Facebook have created a new design for new Groups being created and some new functions to Pages.
There are benefits to both – my preference is Pages( due to the nature of the clients I work with and what they need to achieve) – however if you need to have two way/group communication with your audience then groups are more suitable.
Here is my summary:
Pages
You can:
- Monitor the insights/analytics for the page – this is great for monitoring the activity on the page
- Get ‘widgets’ and ‘like streams’ for your website – therefore allowing people to ‘like’ the page directly from your website/blog
- Get a username for your page, therefore being able to direct them straight to the page, without having to rely on Facebook’s search engine (eg www.facebook.com/SocialMediaMarketingSouthWales)
- Be logged in as your facebook page and comment/like other business pages (this is a new feature since we had the coaching session)
- Get notifications if someone comments or likes on any content of your page (another new feature)
- Update the wall so that it will appear in the fans news feed
- Add applications such as Reviews, Networked Blogs, Customised Applications, Online shop – giving the page more functionality
Groups
You can:
- Add people to the group from your friends list without their prior permission (as a Facebook user who has had this done to them, it is quite annoying)
- Updates will appear as a notification rather than appear naturally in your news feed (this setting can be changed, but again, quite annoying in the first instance)
- Chat with other members of the group using online chat (even if you aren’t friends with them)
- Create documents to be stored on the group and edited by multiple people
- Keep groups secret and only allow selected people to join the group
- Set up a group email address so that any emails sent to that address will go to all members within the group
Hope this answers your questions you may have on this subject? I might have missed a couple of things, therefore here is some more information from Facebook direct https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1193
