Marketing and selling online with a small or home business

One of the hottest trends in marketing today is Facebook marketing. While you do have to use it pretty carefully, it does offer a fair amount of potential and opportunity to its users. Advertising options, various groups, and multiple pages are just a few ways that you can promote your brand.

Facebook Marketing with Groups

Community building is still a popular method of online marketing. You can set up your company as a group, and it can be the center of everything that has to do with your brand. Customers and prospective clients can take part in discussions on your Facebook page. Then you may want to encourage them to share the information with others. Setting up a group can be a great way to stay in touch with your potential and existing customers.

While the group function does offer quite a few advantages, it also has some disadvantages. If your group is larger than 1500 members, you cannot send a message to the entire group. This restriction really narrows your ability to communicate with everyone quickly and easily. Groups sometimes get a lot of spam, and because of that you may not want to set up a group.

Facebook Marketing with Pages

Pages are similar to groups, but there are some distinct differences between the two. Pages are a fairly new Facebook marketing technique, and they were designed specifically for business to help advertise their brands as well as to constructively engage their customers.

One of the things that is really different between pages and groups is pages have more ability to be customized. You can incorporate Flash, Facebook applications and HTML to help customize your page. Groups, on the other hand, promote a brand on each member's profile page. It is easy to send messages to all of your Facebook page fans.

Even if a prospect is not registered on Facebook, they can still see your company Facebook page, because Google will index it and display it in the search list. As you look more strongly at SEO options, you will find that since search engines index the page and not the group, incorporating a Facebook page for your company may be well worth your time.

Pages also offer you a customizable URL name. It is important to have a your domain name with embedded keywords when you are using SEO criteria. Being able to create a simple URL for people to remember is also great marketing on a human level as well.

Facebook page account holders can schedule events, look at statistics, and invite members to events. Social ads promote any page.

After reading through the pros and cons of pages versus groups, it may seem like pages win hands down, but really they are just a little different from each other. Pages will work best for brand promotion that needs to happen in the long term, and groups will work better for grabbing quick attention in a short amount of time.

So it is not really a question of which is better, page or group, because it all depends on your marketing goal.  Which one you choose simply depends on what you are trying to accomplish with your Facebook marketing plan.

Pages as well as groups are just a couple of methods for advertising on Facebook.  Do your best to tailor them to your company's specific needs, and you may just be surprised at the successes that appear when social networking is part of your Facebook marketing plan.

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