Facebook Groups: More Powerful Than Before

We’ve written before about the differences between Groups and Pages, but in our last post we only gave a quick mention of that seemingly age-old debate. Facebook’s Groups have undergone some massive changes in the last few months, and ministries considering the switch to Pages have often raised some very legitimate concerns with the limitations of a Page.

Many people have listed the benefits of Pages over Groups, but here are a few reasons to consider a Group instead of a Page:

• Groups have a higher involvement mentality: you join a group, becoming a member. Pages, on the other hand, are more distant–you can merely like them, but it doesn’t really change your identity.
• Groups can send actual messages to their members. Pages, on the other hand, can only send “updates,” which almost disappear in a separate inbox tab.
• Groups can invite every member to an event; Page administrators can only invite their own personal friends.
• The new Groups features include collaborative features for the entire Group like Group Chat, Shared documents, and more.

I don’t have a lot of personal experience with the new Groups feature, so if you’ve seen any other really helpful features, please chime in.

Also, Matt McComas wrote a post last week entitled “New Facebook Groups” about his experiences working Facebook Groups. He has a few great thoughts on practical uses for Facebook Groups; make sure to check out his post and share good ideas there.

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