What’s the dif­fer­ence between a Face­book Fan Page and a Face­book Group?

This was the ques­tion posed to me by a mem­ber of the audi­ence fol­low­ing my present­a­tion on Social Media Mar­ket­ing at a busi­ness net­work­ing lunch earlier this week.

To be hon­est I must admit that I did waffle a response to the ques­tion presen­ted to me which no doubt didn’t give any­one in the room any sat­is­fac­tion. Still no one let on! Phew!

So being the inquis­it­ive per­son that I am and not want­ing to be put on the ‘spot’ like that again; I decided to do a bit of research and find an answer to the question:

“What’s the dif­fer­ence between a Face­book Fan Page and a Face­book Group?”

Here’s my findings

Fan Pages vs Groups

Face­book in its Help Centre sum­mar­izes the dif­fer­ences as;

“Groups and Pages serve dif­fer­ent pur­poses on Face­book. Groups are meant to foster group dis­cus­sion around a par­tic­u­lar topic area while Pages allow entit­ies such as pub­lic fig­ures and organ­iz­a­tions to broad­cast inform­a­tion to their fans. Only the author­ized rep­res­ent­at­ive of the entity can run a Page”

But surely there’s more to it than that?

Dig­ging a bit deeper on the offi­cial Face­book Blog, where I found an inform­at­ive post which talks about this very sub­ject. You can read the full post for your­self here but to pick out the sali­ent points of their fea­tures, here’s a com­par­at­ive table;

For more inform­a­tion on this sub­ject, take a surf over to the highly respec­ted Mash­able blog with its vast lib­rary of posts related to Social Media.

One per­tin­ent to this sub­ject may be found here and includes a nice defin­i­tion of what Face­book Pages and Groups actu­ally are. (Just in case you’ve read this far into my post and are think­ing “What the…?”)

Just be aware that Face­book is always tweak­ing the fea­tures of it Pages and Groups so these and any other posts you may read on the sub­ject, will degrade in their rel­ev­ance over time.

Any­more for Anymore?

If I’ve missed out some key dif­fer­ences between these two Face­book fea­tures or if you’ve dis­covered any quirks your­self through your own efforts or research, then feel free to post them in a com­ment below.

Whilst you’re think­ing about that, feel free to become a Fan of iNet’s own Face­book Page.

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