What’s the Difference Between a Facebook Group and Fan Page?

Facebook provides its users with a number of different tools they can use to follow their favorite celebrities, companies, bands and causes. As you are browsing Facebook and signing one to follow various causes, you might notice that there are Facebook groups and Facebook fan pages. You may also wonder what makes a Facebook Group different from a Facebook fan page? This article will briefly discuss the differences between the two so you can decide which one you would like to join.

Let’s start with the ways in which they are different. The first difference you will notice is that anyone can join a Facebook fan page. This means you can do a search for your favorite athlete or singer and you can easily find their fan page. You can then click on “Become a fan” and you will start receiving status updates and other things from his your page of choice. The fan pages are not registered to a single person and they are visible any time you do a search on Facebook.

Facebook groups are more private than fan pages. In fact, Facebook group pages are only accessible by invitation of the page creator. It’s great for businesses because they can send out a large invite to all the people on their list and hopefully get them to start following their Facebook group. Businesses often prefer the Facebook group is because of its impressive word-of-mouth marketing feature. Once the message is sent, the recipients of the message can also forward it onto all of their Facebook followers. This saves a lot of energy, time and money when someone is looking for new ways to build an effective marketing campaign.

Now that you know the big differences between the two, how are they similar? Here is a list of the many similarities between Facebook Group and Facebook Fan Page:
• Whether someone has created a Group or Fan page on Facebook, the creator has the power to decide what to feature on the page. Since the creator is in charge of creating the fan page or group page, they can decide if they want it to focus on a particular topic like animals or celebrities.
• The Facebook groups and fan pages both allow their authors to post new events and place them on the walls of their followers. Page and Group followers can RSVP to a particular event if an estimated head count is needed.
• Followers of a Facebook Group or Fan page will get status and information updates on anything posted on the page.
• They both allow the Group of Fan page creator to upload videos and share them with the group.
• Targeted ads may be placed within the content of a page to earn advertising revenue.
• If a Group or Page’s creator would like to include a discussion board, they can do that as well. Discussion boards are wonderful because they provide another avenue for establishing a business or name in a given industry. Including a link in discussion board content is always good to do if boosting a website PageRank status is desired.
• A person must be a Facebook user in order to use the groups and fan pages.