Facebook with the passage of time has become one of the most important marketing and advertising platform for businesses. The social networking website has got over a billion users all around the world. While it started as a free service mostly for entertainment purposes it has transformed itself into one of the best brands in the world with yearly revenues in billions of dollars.
Who knows if Mark Zuckerberg had the same vision for the company when it started as a social networking site for college students, the plan was to bring the social experience online. Since Facebook went viral, a worldwide user base and staggering numbers has made it a pioneering platform for marketing and advertising purposes for businesses. While the service was free in the earlier years, listings on Facebook are no longer organic meaning that as a business you could pay the company to get more limelight as well as stay on top of listings. You could also buy advertisements to appear next to users profiles.
Facebook offers a number of options in order to disseminate content to your target audience. If you login to Facebook you could see a number of options, you would also find the link to pages and groups there.
Pages or Groups?
Facebook pages and groups are pretty popular these days among businesses for the reasons mentioned above.
From a business’s perspective having a Facebook presence is useful in three ways:
- You could get to get your message across to your audience
- You could get instant feedback
- You could use the data for marketing purposes
A Facebook page serves as a channel to share content with your fans or customers (potential or existing). While you can disseminate content directly to your audience, your audience gets a chance to communicate with you as well which could give you important clues about the satisfaction/dissatisfaction of customers. Also you get to study your audience’s preferences since you have access to content they want to share. Having a Facebook page also comes in handy when you want to introduce new products/services to your audience that is still in the preliminary stage i.e.. if you’re pursuing a push model for a product/service. You could get valuable insights into desired/undesired features and make changes while you still can. However, as a perquisite you need to make sure that the audience you have on your Facebook page is a representative sample for the population you want to target.
Facebook groups on the other hand are more useful for gathering data and possibly new concepts and ideas for your products/services. You could moderate posts, initiate topics and get feedback from what I like to call brainstorming exercises where your audience could give valuable input into what kind of products/services they want/need. Read further if you’re interested in how to manage a social media presence for your business.
However there are some marked differences between the two. A Facebook page is more advertising prone while Facebook groups work more like a data-gathering tool. The same difference between a lecture and a tutorial. Most important distinction is that you could promote your posts through Facebook page by paying money to get more visibility in your audience’s newsfeed while such an activity is not possible in Facebook groups. Also you could analyse your audience’s statistics through the ‘insights’ feature if you happen to own a Facebook page.
The points mentioned above could also serve as a barometer to judge whether a ‘page’ is more suitable for you or a ‘group’.