Facebook Marketing: Pages and Groups

Facebook recently overhauled Groups to look a lot like Pages with a few small (but significant) functionality tweaks. For marketers, how should you think about Groups and Pages in your social media marketing mix?

Facebook attempts to explain the difference:

“Keep in mind that while Groups and Pages now look the same, they still serve different purposes. Groups are for fostering member-to-member collaboration, while Pages remain the best way to broadcast messages to your fans if you are a business, organization, public figure or other entity.”

Groups provide a great opportunity to demonstrate leadership in a market or niche.  If a strong group does not exist already, you can fill the void and create a Group. Key here is to lead the community, inspire innovative thinking and open communication and community.  If you do that, you will learn new things about your prospects, understand where your market is headed and be a sharper marketer. Oh yea, you get authority and leadership perception in your market as well.  But you need to inspire before you can lead.

Pages are a great place to broadcast your messages to you Fan base. Key with Pages is to incorporate a linking strategy from your Facebook Pages with your blog, website and other distributed content.  Facebook Fan Pages are a great audience aggregation vehicle, but you need to move your fans to where you will eventually do business with them.  That is your webiste.

Like any new media vehicle you employ, Facebook should fit into your overarching strategy and tactics that drive more leads, customers and profits to your business.