A page or a group?
- by merylpixelmagic
- posted December 14, 2015
So many times I see business creating a Group on Facebook .. and I often get asked “Do I need a Facebook Business Page or a Group?”
I think the clue’s in the name, personally 😉
If you have a BUSINESS, (ie: you’re wanting to do something that earns an income, makes money in some way) then should you have a BUSINESS Page or a Group, on Facebook? (Don’t all answer at once now ;))
And let’s not even start on people who use PERSONAL PROFILES for their BUSINESSES … apart from being against Facebook’s Usage Policy, that’s just silly!
Here’s the thing: Personal Profiles are for people (individuals), Business Pages on Facebook are for businesses and Groups are for social groups, like a book club, sports group or team, movie night club, church group etc.
And here’s why:
Bigger is better:
Pages are designed for lots and lots of people commenting, posting, interacting.
Groups are a nightmare if they get too big; it’s hard to find posts (as the latest always floats to the top) ; and they’re difficult to administrate.
Business gets advertised:
Pages are uniquely designed to hook into Facebook ads (you know, those little blocks down the side of the Facebook page?) . Facebook ads are incredibly effective (as well as cost effective) .You don’t HAVE to have Facebook ads, but if and when you want them, you need to have a business Page to be able to take advantage of all the ad features.
Groups … are not 😉
Who said what?
You can have more than one person contributing to your business pages’ posts – but they all will post under the Page’s name. Ie: the post will say “XYZ Business is having a great day” instead of “John Smith is having a great day”, no matter which of your admins posts.
This does a few things for you:
- Your audience starts to identify with your brand name or business as an individual entity, which is great for building brand loyalty!
- You present a seamless, united front automatically
- You can spread the marketing workload or even outsource your social media marketing requirements without your internal business decisions being apparent to your fans
Groups do not have this ability.
Webability (is that a word?!)
Pages also have cool features like the ability to hook a live stream into your website very very easily, no matter what kind of website you have. So as your Facebook page drives visitors to your website, your website drives people to your Facebook page where they can interact with you.
Groups can’t do this.
Message in a bottle
The one advantage groups used to have over Pages was that you could directly message all group members (you need to use Updates to get messages to your Page Fans – but those also land in the inbox area!) but that’s no longer the case – the new Groups do not have that ability.
THE BOTTOM LINE:
If your business has a group rather than a page, the first impression you give potential clients is of your ignorance. And worse, public ignorance. Alternatively, you give the impression that you’re too lazy to do your homework and find out what you should be doing. So you give potential clients a choice of doing business with a company that’s either lazy or ignorant.
Not really the message you want to be giving, is it?
I hope this goes some way to helping you answer your “Should I have a Facebook Business Page or a Group?” question!
Click http://www.facebook.com/pages to get started with creating your Facebook page …. or if you’d like me to do it for you, click http://www.pixelmagic.co.za/social.html to see what can be done!
