Sunday 27 March 2011

Difference between Facebook Groups & Pages

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

TUC Member