Setting Up Facebook For Business Profiles & Fan Pages

http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Facebook Groups * Administration – As the group administrator, you can easily send messages to group members, making it easier to communicate with them about your business. * Familiarity – Facebook pages are relatively new, only having debuted in the last year or so, but groups have been around since the start. Because of that, people are a lot more familiar with groups and how to join and use them than they are with pages.

– Groups are only visible to Facebook members, so someone who’s doing a search on Facebook won’t be able to see it unless they have a profile and are logged in. * No extra applications – You can’t extra features to Facebook groups – what you see is what you get, which is generally the bare-bones stuff such as discussion boards, a wall, photo gallery, and basic administrative features. * Need to visit regularly – If you post a message to the group’s wall, you won’t see if or when someone responded to what you wrote unless you go back and visit often. This can be a big drawback if you want to facilitate a flowing conversation. .

* Less visibility on people’s profiles – When you join a group, it gets added to a long list of the other groups that you’re already a member of – and one that isn’t bulleted and lists the groups in no particular order to boot. If someone has a lot of groups that they’re a member of, it’s not easy to find yours amongst everything else

Facebook Fan Page There are a lot more benefits to using a page versus using a group, such as: * Are widely accessible – Pages can be seen and found on the wider Internet to people who aren’t members of Facebook, so you do gain wider exposure in that sense. But even so, you have to be a member of Facebook to interact with the group. * Applications are available – As the page administrator, you can add applications to your page, similar to the way you can add applications to your Facebook profile. * Tracking – Facebook has provided page administrators a tool that lets them know how many visitors that they’re getting. * Better visibility – On your profile page, groups are displayed at the bottom with an image associated with that group next to it. The presentation and use of an image means that you get better visibility on their profile, making it easier for them (and others) to find your page. * Actions are documented – If a fan of your page takes action on it, such as writing on your wall or posting a video, their actions will be documented on the news feeds of their personal pages. Their friends will see the news feeds and if curious, check out your page – giving you more exposure.