Facebook Groups and Pages: Which Is Better for Engagement?

You have a great product or service. You need to get the word out and start creating buzz around your brand, but since social media changes at such a rapid pace, you’re unsure of where to start. Every social platform has its own set of nuances that make management a full-time job. Creating buzz that ultimately leads to sales requires more than just a few casual tweets -it requires community management and engagement on the social networks where your buyers are.

If you find yourself scratching your head thinking, I don’t know where my buyers are, then you’re in the right place. We’re going to break down the difference between a Facebook group and a Facebook page, and why your business probably needs both — as long as there is proper moderation and community support.

Facebook Pages

Facebook pages are often the first way that fans and buyers interact with your brand because they serve as the source of truth about company updates and news (other than your own website). Think of a Facebook page as a digital billboard, with opportunities to engage with your community and customers. Facebook pages are great for Google search results (SEO/SEM), especially when there are reviews tied to your product or service.

Aside from being present and actively engaging with your customers and fans, the key to a successful Facebook page is creating regular content updates. The more content that’s created, the more often it’ll be seen in a newsfeed. Multimedia content typically fares well: photos, videos, gifs, and other images alongside text.

When your brand puts out an update, fans can react and engage, but unless there’s a major update (like a new product release or marketing initiative) page posts don’t lend themselves well to organic dialogue between fans. But! Facebook groups are the perfect place to facilitate engagement and interaction between fans and followers. 

Facebook Groups

Facebook groups are where fandoms thrive. They were designed to facilitate conversations and interactions between strangers in a meaningful way. When a brand creates a Facebook group, it’s typically designed to bring people together in order to share tips, tricks, advice, and support around one facet of a product or service. They’re built for social activity. Since groups are inherently more human and engaging than pages, they require significant moderation to ensure that comments are helpful rather than condescending, for example.

Let’s imagine you’re a video game maker and you want some meaningful insights into how people are reacting to your game. Or you’re a marketing agency that wants to bring together marketers to share their learnings and success stories with each other to position your agency as helpful and relevant. Both of those instances lend themselves well to a Facebook group because they both have passionate, thoughtful followers who are capable of creating content between other members.

Content examples that lend themselves well to Facebook groups include posing questions about relevant topics, creating polls, asking for photo submissions of group members using your product or service, and other lighthearted conversation starters. Think of Facebook groups like virtual backyard barbeques. They should be engaging and thoughtful and should encourage interaction between strangers. Your brand can occasionally pepper in updates about products and services, but in order to maintain a trusting relationship between fans, the group shouldn’t be sales-based.

Both Facebook groups and pages are not “set it and forget it.” They both require human intervention through moderation, content creation, topic suggestions, and page owner engagement in order to work well. If you build it, they will come, but with the right content, support, and know-how.