Facebook, on the surface, seems pretty simple. You post comments and photos, people can view them and they can like them and comment on them. However, when you really dig into the mechanics of Facebook, it can get a little confusing. Especially, if you have a business and you are not sure whether you want to create pages or groups or both.
How do you determine which one you need or if you actually need both? I will attempt in this article to explain the differences between the two and how each can help your business.
Let's start with what exactly is a Facebook page. A Facebook page is a page created in your Facebook account. Pages can have friends, you can put pictures on them and people can post things to your page. Your page will consist of two walls, one that the page owner writes on and one that the page fans write on.
So, what then is a Facebook group? A group is different than a page in that you can decide who can belong to the group. It can be open to everyone or it can be open to only a select group of people. If your group is a closed group, you would have an administrator to monitor the group and approve people to join or invite people to join.
So, how do you decide which to have for your business?
If you have a business, you probably want to have a Facebook page. Having a page will allow you to interact with a lot of people whereas a group will limit you to 5,000 members. So if you are sending out emails to your group, you would be limited. If you want to update your page, you can send updates from the page to your fans and there is no limit as to how many fans you can send the update to.
Also, if you have a fan page, fan pages don't have any inboxes. So, people can't do any personal communications with you via your fan page.
If you have a business, you would most certainly want as many people as possible to view your page. You probably would not want to limit the number to 5,000. You can, however, set limitations on your page visitors by setting up age and location settings in the profit. So, you would have some control over who is viewing your page.
If your business is hosting events, you can create events in both pages and groups. If you have an event that is open to only a certain group of people, you can form a group and then update that group of people to those types of events.
One thing to note, a Facebook page will be indexed by the search engines while a group will not. So, if you want your business to be indexed by the search engines, you will need to have a page.
If you have a business, you will most likely want to advertise. You can purchase ads to promote either your Facebook page or your Facebook group.
Bottom line, if you have a business you can benefit from using pages or groups, depending on your type of business and how you want to communicate with your Facebook fans.
By the way, do you want to learn more about using Facebook for your business? If so, download my free Facebook report here: CLICK HERE
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Catherine_Quel
