What’s the difference between Groups and Pages on Facebook?

Posted on 25. Jan, 2010 by Suraj in Internet Marketing, SEO, Social Networking

There are a number of differences between a Facebook group and a Facebook page that many people do not know about, or that are not very obvious to the uninitiated.

If you are thinking of starting a group or a page on Facebook, here are some things that you should know and consider when deciding which to go for to promote your business/cause/hobby etc:

Pages (i.e. ‘Become a Fan’)

In my opinion, the most important distinction here is that a Facebook Page can be crawled & indexed by Search Engines which means that any content on a Page can be found online through Search Engines such as Google or Yahoo!

• Send updates to fans
• Updates are seen in your fans’ news feed
• ability to add various 3rd party applications to your page such as Twitter which can personalise your page further.
• Great for feeding RSS links into page from your blog
• Restrict access to your page by user age and location
• Pages are not seen as an extension of your personal profile – i.e. great for companies. The page admin is not listed anywhere on the page so a fan would not necessarily know who owns the page
• Can create events
• Stats to monitor page activity such as number of fans, post interactions etc
• No limit as to number of fans

Groups (i.e. ‘Join This Group’)

Groups on Facebook are seen as much more personal and are visibly linked to the person who created the page and the admins.

• Can send messages to all group members (up to a maximum of 5000 members)
• Can setup secret by-invite only groups and moderate much easier than Pages
• Can create events and invite all members of the group to the event
• Not indexed by the Search Engines
• Cannot add 3rd party applications or link blogs/Twitter to groups

There are other differences between the Pages and Groups but the above comparison should get your started when deciding whether to have a Page or a Group.

Groups are great for promoting personal hobbies or interests whereas Pages get my vote when you want to promote a business or a raise brand awareness.

Tags: facebook, groups, pages