In my previous post, I write about the advantages of social media marketing for your business on Facebook. Here, I will focus on the differences between Facebook fan pages and Facebook group pages and any advantages or disadvantages from a business perspective.

The differences between Facebook fan pages vs. Facebook groups are minor, but one of the main advantages to Facebook fan pages is indexing. Fan pages are accessible to the public and can be picked up via search engines. This means that fan pages have a greater chance of being noticed and will show up on your friend’s feeds when you join. Group pages can only be seen via Facebook and does not have public access. While that makes it harder to search, group pages have the viral advantage of being able to send or invite your friends to join; a feature that fan pages do not have.

Another feature unique to group pages is sending private messages. An administrator has the ability to send messages directly to a member’s inbox, while Fan pages can only send messages that show up on the notification bar on the bottom right hand corner of your web browser. While the notification bar alerts you when a new notification is up, users often ignore the feature due to unwanted or unnecessary “spam” messages that often clog up the notifications.

So which option is better for business and social media marketing? While most of the basic features are the same, the key differences between fan pages and groups are major enough to warrant an examination. Fan pages are more versatile because you can connect your blog rss feeds to automatically syndicate, and add web applications. Administrators are not known publically and fan pages do not connect with the administrator’s personal account. The fan page can be seen more like an entity rather than an individual. This makes it more attractive for celebrities, brands, and businesses, who may hire someone to manage their accounts. Fan pages also do not have a member limit while group pages cap out at 5,000.

In summation, fan pages are the better option for social media marketing and a businesses web presence, but groups can work great for smaller ventures related to a more specific cause or social media campaign, such as marketing an event.

Tags: business social media, communication, creative marketing, facebook, Facebook page, social media campaign, social media marketing

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 at 12:10 am and is filed under blogging, social media general, social media sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.