Yesterday Nick O’Neil, the founder of in my opinion the top three blog when it comes to knowledge about Facebook, wrote “Facebook Groups Vs Pages: The Definitive Guide”.

There is no doubt that a lot of people can’t figure out what to use, especially since Facebook alters the features once in a while.

This is a sum up and my own conclusion of Nick’s insightful blog post.

Groups

First let’s look at those features in which groups have an advantage over pages. There are three administrative features of groups that don’t work on pages:

• Mass-messaging: You can send a message directly from the group to members. This is a cool feature, if you have a your local soccer team in a group and want to send them the invites to the next game. A marketer may also think that it’s a great feature to send direct messages, but be aware that if the group gets more than 5,000 members, this feature disappears.

• Membership restriction: This actually only makes sense for a small group. It’s a cool thing if you want to use the Facebook platform for a small closed group of people working on a project, or if you are going to make a Small World with membership restriction. A lot of clubs could use groups on behalf of this feature.

• Event inbox messaging: This is actually the feature that I as a Page fan miss the most. The problem for Page administrators is that the viral feature of an event, ends up in the users’ Pages updates instead of the inbox.

Pages

There are lots of features only working for pages, which makes it advantageous to use pages for businesses. Some of the more important are:

• Stream publishing: Publishing directly to a user’s feed is probably one of the most important features, and here I have a little disagreement with Nick. He points out that it’s exactly the same for pages and groups. In my opinion – not true! A page publishes to all of the fan’s feed, whereas in a group, the administrator of the group is the sender of the messages to the users feed. Therefore the publishing is personal and if you are not friends with the administrator, you will not get that update in your feed.

• Support for applications: You have a much larger design freedom of a page and if you do it right, you can almost turn a page into a user-interactive microsite.

• Engagement metrics: You have access to all the insights of your efforts to get engaged with fans. This is a must if you work professionally with Facebook.

• Vanity URL and promotional widget: Vanity URL refers to the possibility of having a short URL with your name in it, as for instance www.facebook.com/Mindjumpers. Again two features you need if you work with Facebook for your business, you need to make your efforts visible outside Facebook, and here the vanity url is an especially important feature.

Conclusion

If you want to use Facebook for your business you have to use a page, and you also need to learn how to use the different features, so that you get the most out of your effort. I strongly recommend you to take a look at http://allfacebook.com to get valuable knowledge and insight on how to get the most out of Facebook.

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Tags: Facebook groups, Facebook guide, Facebook Pages, Groups vs. Pages, Jonas Klit Nielsen, Nick O'Neil