Persistence Marketing:

There is this funny sequence of events that seem to keep showing up and as such I figured it was time for me to simply put it in writing. Considering that I spend a considerable amount of time helping business owners leverage technology for their business development needs, you can imagine that one of the more common topics of conversation center around Social Media. Additionally with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn being so popular I tend to field lots of questions related to how best to leverage these sites as part of their overall marketing and business development. At this point I have lost track of the number of times I have been asked the question:

What would be better for my business a Facebook Fan Page or a Facebook Group?

Not so surprising is the fact that I had this question come up again this afternoon with a client. Typically one of my first questions back to them is: Why do you think that you are limited to one or the other? In reality if you have the time and resources to do so, I would recommend creating both in order to leverage the strengths of both of these tools. For most small business owners this simply is not practical which brings us to the point of this article.

While I had planned to do some writing today, this was not the topic that I had scheduled to write about, but that has never stopped me before.

First and foremost there are two major differences that I like to make business owners aware of:

1 – Facebook Fan Pages are indexed by the search engines and therefore visible to people searching the Internet via Google and other search engines. As such your entire page is visible to Non-Facebook prospects via the Internet.

2 – Facebook Groups allow you to send out “bulk invites” to all of your Facebook friends (you can easily invite all of your Facebook friends to join the group).  With Facebook Fan Pages you only option is to manually invite your friends to join your Facebook Fan Page. Therefore as you can easily see groups are better for viral marketing. This becomes even more powerful when you learn that any group member can also send bulk invites to their Facebook Friends.

Now before you get too excited about the viral marketing abilities of creating a Facebook group I would highly recommend that you learn about some of the other details that may very well have an impact on your decision.

The primary reason that you have the viral marketing capabilities of the Facebook Groups is simply due to the fact that Groups are tied to your Facebook profile. As such if you are interested in having some separation between your personal Facebook Profile and a Facebook Group that you have created for marketing your business, this becomes difficult.

What is the point of creating either a Facebook Fan Page or a Group if you don’t or can’t communicate with all of your members? With communications being such an important aspect of any of your marketing you will want to make note of the following details on communicating with your members.

With Groups that have fewer than 5000 members you are allowed to send messages to all members and that message will appear in their Facebook Message Inbox. Facebook Fan Pages allow you to communicate with all of your members regardless of how many members you may have as fans. The difference here is that your communication will go to your members update section of their profile. For me personally this was a serious concern, but after some research it does not appear to make a major difference.

Something that many people do not realize is that both Facebook Groups and Fan Pages allow you to use advertising as promotional tools. Keep in mind that Facebook ads are a paid feature, but are very useful for attracting membership. A big plus of running an advertising campaign when you have a Fan Page is that when you’re ad appears on someone’s page, if one of their friends is a fan of your page that friend’s name appears below the ad as “Jane Doe is a fan”.

Another big plus for Facebook Fan Pages is that once your page has acquired 25 fans, you can create a custom URL. If you have read about the importance of having search engine friend URLs you will understand the importance of having a URL like www.Facebook.com/businessName. With the groups your only choice is the typical Facebook URL that no one would ever remember and isn’t so great for the search engines. For those business owners that understand the importance of branding, search engines and simply having user-friendly URLs there isn’t much else to say

That brings us to the fact that Facebook Fan pages are indexed by Google and other search engines while Facebook Groups are not. While I made mention o f this before I think it is important to note that if someone finds your Facebook fan page from outside of Facebook, they can see the full page and all the information even if they are not logged in. With Facebook Groups your visitors must already be Facebook members to see the details of your Group.

With Facebook Groups the creator and/or admin has much more control over who can join. Groups over you the choice of having your Group completely open, where anyone can join, or they can be set to secret so that only people specifically invited even know the group exists. Facebook Fan Pages however are completely open and that is the only choice you have as a creator/admin. Anyone can find the page and anyone can join. Keep in mind that even with Facebook Groups that are open you can require that new members must be approved by the administrator.

For me personally, one of the biggest pluses offered by Facebook Fan Pages is the fact that Fan Pages are highly customizable. They’re far more options that can be added to a fan page such as having an opt-in box, selling from your site directly from your site, application API for Facebook Connect, etc, etc, etc. Please keep in mind that some of these options will require a high level of technical savvy or a good friend who you can call on to help. However, for a professional business that is trying to leverage the marketing potential that is offered by having a presence on Facebook this is a VERY important point to remember.

Have you created a group or a fan page for your business? Please leave a comment telling everyone why you made the choice that you did.  Have both? Great let everyone know how you use them to maximize the benefits of each.

To Your Success!

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