In the process of rolling out Facebook marketing campaigns for clients that involve some combination of Facebook Applications, pages and groups, we often get asked what that the difference is between Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups, and more importantly, which is better.

To the untrained eye they are pretty similar, but in reality, for marketing purposes – Facebook Pages are significantly superior to Facebook Groups. In general they have all the features of a group plus (the very important) ability to add applications and do perform more extensive customization on the page. Here is a quick comparison of the two:

Feature/Benefit	Facebook Pages	Facebook Groups
Applications	Most	None
User Interaction	High	Limited (and ONLY with IFRAMES*)
Promotion	Post to Profile Send Update to Fans Advertisements	Post to Profile
Invitations	Share	Share Invite Members
Metrics	Comprehensive	None
Associations	Yes	Partial
Access	Public (anyone) can access	Users must register/login
Administrators	Not Shown	Visible

• Applications: Pages allow you to add many of the thousands of applications available on Facebook. This allows you to add apps like RSS feeds and other dynamic content as well as to customize your Facebook page.
• User Interaction: Applications (including IFRAMES) support increased user interaction on Facebook Pages. Groups do not support applications and only sponsored Groups (for companies committed to spending at least $50K in advertising for a minimum of 3 months) can add IFRAMEs.
• Promotion: The ability to promote your page or group is key to any marketing campaign. Pages provide more flexible ways to recruit fans/users including placing Social Ads that point to your page as well as the ability to send email updates to fans.
• Invitations: Both pages and groups have equal support for inviting other users to become fans of a page or join a group. Groups may actually have a slight edge in the category but not a significant one.
• Metrics: Pages provides comprehensive and valuable “insight” on user activity on a page. This functionality is sadly missing from groups.
• Associations: You’ll notice that groups (optionally) have a list of related groups. Unfortunately there is no way to control which groups appear on that list, making it rather useless. With a page you can add a list of links (to groups or other resources) that you want to promote or associate with your page.
• Access: Probably one of the most important differences. Anyone (aka the public) can access a Facebook Page. Groups, however, require users to register and sign up for Facebook.
• Administrators: Groups reveal information about who the group’s creators and administrators are, page keep this information private.