Facebook Groups vs Facebook Fan Page: What's Better?

Facebook allows for 2 networking tools:

1. Creating/ joining a Facebook group;

2. Creating/ joining a Facebook fan page

While the major differences become evident only after you try out them first, we decided to create and promote both for Search Engine Journal:

* Search Engine Journal Group;

* Search Engine Journal Fan Page.

Now what we have found from this experiment..

First and foremost the 2 major differences include:

1. Unlike groups, fan pages are visible to unregistered people and are thus indexed (important for reputaion management, for example);
2. Unlike pages, groups allow to send out “bulk invite” (you can easily invite all your friends to join the group while with pages you will be forced to drop some invites manually). Groups are thus better for viral marketing, meaning that any group member can also send bulk invites to the friends of his.

Now let’s go into some details:

Key Feature Facebook Page Facebook Group “Ugly” URLs No Yes Hosting a discussion Yes Yes Discussion wall, and discussion forum Yes Yes Extra applications added Yes No Messaging to all members Yes (via updates) Yes (via PMs) Visitor statistics Yes (“Page insights”) No Video and photo public exchange Yes Yes “Related” event creation and invitation Yes No Promotion with social ads Yes (never tried it) No

To conclude:

• Pages are generally better for a long-term relationships with your fans, readers or customers;
• Groups are generally better for hosting a (quick) active discussion and attracting quick attention.

Read more

Hey we need to Understand one basic fact about Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups.

Facebook Pages are a promote a business, band, shop and so on...

whilst Facebook groups are to promote a common interest.

Hence the tools given are pretty different.

On FB Pages you have more Tools like targeted Message sending (you can filter by age, sex, country, etc. whom you wanna send the message to) then the options for stats and even promotion of the page using ads. It gives a good reason for someone to come and use their ad platform.

On the other hand, FB Groups allow you to have group structure with group officers and admins and stuff, in order to regulate and facilitate discussion.

and the other addons like photos / videos and stuff are just part of the package to fill it up and make it look big.