(Part 2 of a 5-part series: What I Learned From the Industry Experts on Using Facebook Well: An Interview with Michelle Widman of Brandglue)

A few weeks ago Michelle Widman, the Project/Community Manager at Brandglue.com, agreed to sit for a phone interview with me. Brandglue is a social media firm that call themselves the “News Feed Optimization Agency”, and whose client lists include heavy hitters such as YouTube, Intel, Microsoft. Brandglue works with companies and organizations to help them optimize their customer interactions on Facebook. I’ve summarized what I learned from her and am posting it piece by glorious piece this week.

Once Michelle shared how much she valued Facebook, I had to ask her the age-old question: Page or Group? She chose Page, and here’s why.

Pages offer greater control and more hope

Facebook Pages (formerly known as “Fan Pages”) have a few features that make them extremely valuable right now:

• Greater administrative capabilities
• Status updates (meaning we can interact with the news feeds of our members)
• Statistics on page views, etc.

But most importantly, Michelle says, Pages are where Facebook is putting their money and new development because they’re what businesses use; therefore, even if Groups are an option now, they’re likely to see less active development in the future than Pages.

See some of our previous conversations about Pages vs. Groups here: Facebook Groups Versus Pages for Campus Ministry, Facebook Groups: More Powerful Than Before, Can a Facebook Group/Page Be a “Home Base”?

Facebook is for interactions, not visits

Many businesses and more and more organizations, trying to take full advantage of Facebook, are trying to turn Facebook pages into replicas of their existing web sites, offering multiple tabs of content about their organization.

Michelle stressed a key point: Facebook is not just another web page. Your visitors, whether they’re students or alumni, don’t visit your page to sit down–they come to interact.

This point is driven home by Brandglue’s research showing that the majority of visitors never return to a fan page after clicking “like” on it. That means that even though they like your organization, they’re not visiting your page. How do respond to this information? We can’t just design a beautiful page and wait for them to visit us; instead, we have to interact with them and invite them to interact with us.

Coming up next: How to Optimize Your Use of the Facebook News Feed (Brandglue interview part 3)