Search, PPC, Performance, Social, Turkey

What is the real difference between Facebook Pages and Groups?

This is the most common question I face nowadays from brand managers, small business owners and startup companies.

Seemingly they already decided to create some kind of a Facebook presence - or even they started up with something. The next question is usually the above, sometimes followed by another one: “I started up with a personal profile, what should I do with the hundreds/thousands of friends I’ve already gathered?” And of course they are afraid of the most common answer: “shut it down”. Actually I heard rumours that Facebook is shutting down those profiles without notice - so the best way is to create a group or page for the brand, and notify friends about it urging them to change before it gets closed down. Unfortunately there’s no better option.

Back to the question firstly I would recommend  to read this page from AllFacebook.com. The below chart from that page shows most of the differences quite clearly:

As for an international brand it’s no question that targeting languages (targeted stream posts) is an inevitable option - or they still can target users with two different language Pages, like Hungarian Airlines Malév does here and here. Or they can target all members with two language posts like Fania Music does.

For a lot of marketers the question is more simple: Which of the following features do you need more? Direct e-mail messages sent to the members’ e-mail address or the possibility of creating custom html pages?

For example a business or brand that manages a series of events should clearly stay with Groups (like I did with my local salsa addict brand). Of course the 5 000 members cap on this can be a serious issue for a lot of brands.

Big brands that spend money on building awareness surely can exploit the opportunities of creating custom HTML pages via Facebook’s FBML application. Of course there is another option open for big brands with Facebook pages to use e-mal addresses: they can create an application and ask for special permissions from the users. I still can’t see many brands doing this.

My personal note on this issue is that although I understand Facebook restricting Pages from using e-mail addresses - they are overwhelmed fighting spammers and they have a lot of privacy issues - but I still can’t see too many reasons for the feature differentiation of Pages and Groups. Hope that we’ll see barriers between these two basic Facebook features - Groups and Pages - disappearing or at least decreasing.