For the last couple of years, to market a product, a service and even a company through social networks became a must. Marketers have for a long time laud actions on target customers and designed their marketing campaigns according to focus groups. E-newsletters have been a little revolution and the power of a companies were often seized with the size of their customer database.

It did not take long for marketers to figure out that social networking was a gold mine. For the last years, Facebook grew as the most completed wanted customers database and became a tool as powerful as its financial value ($11.5 billion according to http://www.allfacebook.com/).

As a user, I have been receiving ‘Friend request’ from people I do not know for the last 2 years. The strategy of those business owners was to ask to be friend to every single person in the list of theirs city or country networks. That is definitely time consuming process but that can be rewarding if we consider that around 40% of people are accepting friend requests from lads they do not physically or even virtually know (SOPHOS). The friend list of those people can eventually reach more than 4000 people, who connsequently became potential clients.

A Group or a Page for my business

Having a large friend list gives access to private information about those potential customers, however it does not give tools to market your company or your product. We could think we can create an account with the name of the company but facebook have a system with a dictionary  to avoid people renaming themselves with name that could be considered as a company or product entity.
For example, it is impossible the create an account named: Bob restaurant.

Eventually, a good tool to market is “the group” option. To create a group have multiple features that are very useful to marketers but it was probably not its first purpose imagined by facebook’s creators.

Seeing that companies start using facebook as a marketing tools, facebook decided to create a specific tools for them: The company page

From that, the question raised: What is the difference between a group and a page for my business?

Indeed those two options have different features. We could think that “create a page for my business” is specifically designed for business. However, a group have a couple of more features that the Business page crucially miss.

Accessibility – Where to start?

To create a group is somehow easier than to create a “page for you business” in term of usability. To do so, a user have to click on the group page and then click on the button on the top left on the screen.

To create a page for my business was a little bit more challenging as I needed to access a page from another company and finally to find at the bottom left.Difficult to explain the lack of design consistency and such a flaw in accessibility.

Group Panel and Business Page panel

At the first glance we can already see differences between the two panel. The Group panel provides more options than the company’s one.

Besides, the insights panel of the business page deserves more understanding. If I still did not understand how the number displayed is calculated, clicking on this link provide a wide range of statistics about company’s fans including gender, ages, languages, countries and city. Those statistics are divided: actives fans and passive one.

This feature is definitely an advantage over the “group page” that does not include this tool.

On the other hand, the group page allow admins to send messages to their group members which can be a more direct way to communicate.

What is best?

Choosing between those two tools basically depends on one need. One would rather push marketing  by sending mails to his groups members while other will prefer having company’s feeds on the facebook feeds page. Additionally, the statistic page is a must have for all marketing department when they want to monitor their audience.

I would tend to think that sending  mails from group can rapidly be considered as junk mails and using the neat facebook feeds page for one’s company is the best.

Promoting with an Ad

Finally, i would like to conclude this post by emphasizing the amazing opportunity for marketers that is the “promote with an ad” feature of Facebook.

Not only it can help to spread the word to people who are not in your friend list but we can also target the ad to be displayed on user’s screen according to his age, gender, language or location. Indeed, facebook users entered such important data about themselves that they are finally used for those ads.

This is indeed a wonderful tool for company as they can specifically target their potential customers. The same way than google ads, we can set the maximum daily budget and user will be charge per click on the ads.