facebook-small-logo-thumb-360x360-75537-thumb-300x300-78195Yesterday I wrote about pages as opposed to groups in the facebook universe. I guess I’m just encouraging people to take advantages of pages for all they have to offer. Groups has been around longer and most of us have more experience with groups. Groups make more sense. They feel safe and community like. However, that’s just becasue we don’t completely understand why you’d use a page. Like I said yesterday, groups have their place and you’ll still use them. However, there may be some things you want to use pages for instead of groups.

So, here’s a little comparison. Here are the things that both groups and pages can do:

  • Wall discussions
  • Discussion boards
  • Photos
  • Videos
  • Send messages to members/fans
  • Create related events

What can a group do that a page can’t?

  • Be obscure – remain totally hidden to everyone but those in the group.
  • Be exclusive – only allow who you want in the group if you roll that way.

What can pages do that groups can’t?

  • Access to applications – certain apps have been developed exclusively for pages
  • Page Statistics – kinda like analytics for you page
  • Demographic messaging – send notifications to all your fans or fans of specific gender, ages or locations
  • Vanity URL – Once you have enough fans, you can claim a vanity URL like www.facebook.com/yourname
  • Advertising – You can drive people to your page through advertising where you determine demographic targets and pay by clicks or impressions

The other big advantage of pages are that they are more viral in nature. Unless the administrator of the group you belong to sends out a message, you may forget you are in it. Other people won’t know you’re in it either. With pages, all of your friends will see you interact with the page as it will show up in your feed. So, people find pages rather quickly. In addition, pages ave viewable outside of facebook. That means the information on your facebook group can be seen by anyone. That also means it can be indexed by the search engines unlike groups or anything else within the facebook walled garden.