By now, literally everyone and their moms have Facebook profiles. It’s the largest growing social network, surpassing MySpace, and continues to grow every day. As intuitive as social networking can sometimes be, actually using it for marketing purposes requires a little more research and thought. Maybe even a lot, depending on your goals. Speaking of goals, it’s important to be well defined in what you hope to achieve when venturing into social media marketing (well, any marketing for that matter). Once you’ve figured that out, the next step is to actually create your account(s). To help you decide whether you want to venture into fan pages or groups, we’ve created the following overview to give you a better understanding of each:
Facebook Groups
If you’ve ever been a part of a group on Facebook, and really, who hasn’t, then you’ll notice that they’re fairly simple. You have your info at the top, text only (no HTML) “Recent News” section, a wall for people to comment and a forum. You have the option to send a message to everyone in the group, invite others to join the group and even do targeted advertising to gather new members.
BOTTOM LINE: Groups are simpler and easier to manage but you’re very limited in how much you can interact with the members, which might not be so good when it comes to social media marketing.
Facebook Pages
Pages (also known as “fan pages”) have a lot of the same features that Groups do, but with many more features. For starters, it functions more like a profile in that your updates show up on you fans walls and they can actually “Like” or comment on what you say, unlike in Groups where you would need to actually reference what someone said if you want to respond to it. The page is laid out with tabs that you can rearrange, add onto, etc (i.e. pictures, videos, notes, events, discussions, etc.). Similar to a Group, you can message everyone, suggest friends become fans and do targeted advertising to gain more fans. Some additional neat features is that Pages are actually searchable from outside Facebook and can also be turned into a widget and embedded on other sites. Click here for an example.
BOTTOM LINE: Pages allow for deeper interaction and brand building along with the opportunity to go “viral” because every time someone becomes a fan, their friends get notified on their Home page.
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