With more and more users joining Facebook every day, the platform has become an ideal place for general people to connect with dear ones and also for reaching out to other people to promote themselves, their business or just a hobby. As per demand of the users themselves, Facebook has made several platforms available in the forms of pages, groups and the latest addition—follow option. If you have something that you want to share with the world, you could simply pick up any of these; but the question is, which one of these should be appropriate for your purpose?
In this article, we have discussed the core features of each of these. Read them and decide which one you want to go with.
Facebook Pages:
Facebook pages originated with the need for representation of non-human existence, such as restaurants or organizations. Now it has bigger and better opportunities with added features, and you can achieve a lot through a page. Following are the core features of a page.
- Privacy Options: The first purpose of being on a social networking website is connectivity, and privacy is the issue that first pops up in our head when we think about getting out of our private social bubble and reaching out to strangers. Facebook pages, although public, have the highest amount of privacy. You can choose if general public can post contents/posts on your page. You can also moderate profane contents by banning certain words. You can also ban/block people if you need to.
- Insights: You can gather information about how many people are seeing the contents posted by your page, how many new likes you are getting from your page and so on in the form of multiple graphs. This helps to make promotion decisions in a better manner.
- Advertising: You can advertise your page on Facebook. Upon signing up for this feature, you need to provide Facebook a certain amount of money, and it will recommend your page to users of the website around the world. This feature is perfect for a better exposure of your page.
Facebook pages are most suitable for small and online businesses, organizations that need to communicate often with audiences; and celebrities/authors who want to communicate with general people without risking their own identity. You can also have a personal page, but if you do not want to pay, you have to manually build the audience.
Facebook Followers:
Following the Twitter trend, Facebook introduced the ‘Follow’ (previously ‘Subscribe’) button in recent years. Here are pros and cons the core features:
- Privacy: With followers, you have complete control over your privacy. Your followers will only get notified of posts that you make public, and will be able to access information (such as your contact details, photo and phone number) that you want to share with the world. You can also choose if your followers can comment on your photos and other posts.
- No Insights: This is a downside of followers—you will not be provided with any insights on how many people see your posts.
- Difficult to Managing: If you are a tech-enthusiast, and decide to share only tech-related photos with your followers, you might face a problem. Not all your friends love tech-related stuff, and your shared posts might cause irritation among many of them.
Follower options are most suitable for celebrities or famous people who share general posts about every aspect of life. If you find a way to avoid irritating your friends, you can also take up followers for sharing ideas of your business/hobby.
Facebook Group:
Groups have been in Facebook pretty much since its inception. The core features are as follows:
- Privacy: You can create a group and add up to any number of members that you want. For privacy, you can make your group public, closed or secret. Each has their different functionality and possibility of emerging on search results.
- No Insights: There are no detailed insights like that of the pages, but a small annotation at the bottom of every post notifies you how many people have seen that particular post. This process is not foolproof, because if the members disable the notifications, they will not see the posts unless they actively visit the group wall.
- Difficult to Manage: All members can post on the group wall, and if you have a large group of, say, 50,000 members and even a minority of them post on the group per day, the group wall has a chance of getting severely littered. In such cases, people become uninterested, and leave group activity after a certain period. However, you have the liberty to choose an option that lets you moderate posts before publishing them, which might be too time-consuming for you if you are the sole admin.
Groups are ideal for small assemblages of people having common interests, such as study groups. It is more helpful in discussing matters rather than promoting something. So if you have a small business or a hobby to show off, you would definitely want to avoid groups.
Acknowledgment: Infographic prepared with Piktochart
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