What’s The Difference Between
Facebook Groups, Pages and Profiles?

This is a question I see a lot in entrepreneurs Facebook groups, especially from those who are new to online marketing.

It can be confusing and if you start looking at fellow business owners and copy what they are doing, it’s easy to break Facebooks Terms Of Service (TOS) and you don’t want to do that!

So let’s break it down and look at what each section is for and how to use it.

.

Your Facebook Profile

To do anything on Facebook you need a Facebook Profile. This is your own personal page, this is the one where you connect with friends and family, share your cat pictures and photos of what you ate for lunch.

It is against Facebooks TOS to do any kind of business from your personal profile. I doubt sharing the occasional post about your business is going to get you in trouble (don’t quote me on that!) but running your business from your personal profile can and will get it shut down.

Yes, people do it, it doesn’t make it right!

Some people drink drive, doesn’t make it OK for you to do the same, right?

Another big no-no is to have more than one profile.

Now I get it, you don’t want to mix business with your personal life, the thing is, Facebook knows that and supplies you with the tools to be able to keep them separate.

Making good use of the lists feature is a good start (follow the tutorial here) and using the privacy function so that you are only posting family and friends related stuff to your family and friends and not to the world.

When you hang out in Facebook groups you do so as yourself usually, as your profile. That said, Facebook has rolled out the ability for Pages rather than Profiles to be being used in groups.

It is up to each Group Owner to decide if they want to allow Pages to join the group, most groups I am in don’t.

Setting Up Your Facebook Profile

There is nothing so annoying as connecting with someone is a group then clicking through to their profile to find out more about what they do to find NOTHING!
No links to their business page, no links to their website. Zilch.
This is a great way to lose potential clients!

EVEN IF you want your profile locked down and kept private you can still link out to where clients can find out more about you.

.Your header. Use this to reflect who you are, what you stand for, add an image to attract the kind of people you want to sell to.
Your profile picture. Should be of YOU and a clear shot of your face, people buy from people.
Intro – who are you and who do you serve?
Your details, FB gives you the resources to add your business pages, social media etc here, make good use of it, it’s prime real estate.
Featured images. Facebook gives you 9 images to add here but if you use just one, you get a nice big billboard. pop a link into the description of the image to where you want people to go (an opt-in, your group, page, website etc)

Go to the Edit Profile and the About/Contact and Basic Info to plug in your links.

Why Do I Need A Facebook Page?

What's the difference between facebook groups and facebook pages. How to use your facebook page

.

Your page is like your shop front, this is where your fans can find you, ask you questions and learn about what is new in your business.

This is also where you run ads from, well the account ads manager. You need to have a personal profile to set up a Page and ads account. Due to the increase in dodgy dealings going on, Facebook is cracking down security wise and checking that fake profiles are not running Pages and accounts. If you are running an honest business this is not something to be concerned about.

There are a variety of Page types, you will want to choose the one that fits closest with your business. You can sell from your Page or you can use it as a fan Page. Your Page is always open to the public so you should consider what you post on there, personal rants about the current political situation could cost you business or you may feel that you only want to deal with people with the same political views, in which case, carry on.

There is a lot of talk about how organic reach just isn’t possible anymore but it’s really not true, it’s more about knowing your audience and giving more of what they want.

This often involves a lot of testing to see what resonates with them.

With your Page, you don’t want all and sundry liking it, you only want your engaged ideal customers. It’s much better to have a small Page with 90% ideal customers who are engaging with you rather than a huge Page with 1% of your ideal customer on there and no engagement.

For this reason, buying likes and joining like swap groups is a really bad idea. If Facebook is only showing your post to 10% of your fans, you want that 10% to be your ideal customers, not to people like your aunt Ethel who has no real interest or understanding of what you do!

You want to be posting on your page daily, depending on your niche and the size of your page that can be anything for twice a day to 8 times a day! Using your analytics will help you figure out which is the best time to post and which types of post your fans like best.

There is a debate on whether the Facebook native scheduler, Creator Studio is better than a scheduling app, I personally haven’t seen much of a difference in reach but I also tend to mix it up. If you are not sure, go with the Creator Studio.

The upside is that it’s free, the downside is that you can’t create libraries of recyclable content. I use Social Bee for mine, (that is an affiliate link) it works like a charm especially for groups, more on that below.

What Are Facebook Groups?

What's the difference between facebook groups and facebook pages. How to make the most out of your facebook group

.

Where your Page is like the shopfront, your group is your community, all hanging out together. There are many reasons for having a group, some are Local Community, Buy and Sell, Support, Learning…

There are 2 levels of privacy settings for a group, the group Admin decides on all this…

PRIVATE: Only members of the group can see who is in the group and the posts.
PUBLIC: Anyone can see who is in the group and read posts.

You can change a Public group to Private but not vice versa, this is to protect the privacy of a group.

Group visibility, this has changed recently. Now the options are:

VISIBLE: Anyone can find this group.
HIDDEN: Only members can find this group.

Only choose the hidden option once all your member are signed up to the group or they won’t be able to find it, even with a direct link.

With groups there tends to be a better community spirit, people feel a bit safer and are more open conversations take place than on a page.

It is a great way to connect at a deeper level with your ideal customers and to find out exactly what they need and for others to connect with each other. I also find hanging out in groups is a great way to network and get known as an expert in your field.

If someone likes what you have to say they will often click through to your profile to find out more about you. This is why it is SUPER IMPORTANT to have your profile optimized.

Is a group better than a page? I think really you should have both, use your page to find the right people then funnel them into your group to build that like, know and trust factor.

Running a group is hard work but the benefit of having your ideal clients telling you exactly what they need and how you can help them outweighs the work.

Tips On Running A Facebook Group:

ONE: Use the questions when a new person applies to join the group to make sure they are a good fit. My advice is, make the questions easy to answer, one or two words each for each question.

A question to identify if they are your target market
How did they find your group (valuable market research)
Offer them your freebie, if asking for an email make sure you are GDPR compliant.

TWO: Ask a trusted friend or relative to be an admin too, just in case your account gets closed down, hacked for some reason or occasionally FB removes you as an admin and you can’t get back in, it is handy to have a backup, just in case.

THREE: Set clear RULES.
You are going to get spammers. So make sure your rules about promotion are super clear along with anything else you feel strongly about.

I took the hard line on this (and since then have little trouble) I have a zero-tolerance policy for spam, they get deleted and booted from the group without notice.

I only had to boot a couple out and the spamming stopped. Now when it does happen it’s a new member trying it on. My community is also shit-hot with reporting spammy posts (I love my members, they are super protective of our space).

FOUR: Be intentional when you set up the group.
Group owners/admin have quite a lot of control over the group settings so take your time checking them out and deciding how you want your group to run. If you are in a group that you love, ask the owner about it and pay close attention to how they have it set up.

Some groups run on themed days using # to signify the day, this can make it easier to check the spam and it can help get the conversation going. I’m in groups that use this really well and groups that don’t have themed days that work equally well.

You might find when your group grows to 5K or more that you will need to bring on a couple of moderators to help out, the bigger the group, the harder to control! I prefer to have a smaller group of ideal customers than a big group that is not. I also have a good clean out every few months too.

If you run a course or program it is quite popular to have a free group, such as my Moms That Rock group and a paid group for the program, I actually have a number of paid groups for my different offerings!

Which brings me back to Social Bee, the scheduling tool I use. You can schedule posts into the group from the group itself but when you have several groups it is very time-consuming. For this, you can hire a VA to do it for you and/or a scheduler like Social Bee.

I use regular daily prompts in my groups along with a library of conversation starters. Every month I add a few more questions to the library and every 90 days or so I will add new images or freshen up the daily prompts if need be.

Don’t Do This!

This is one thing I see people complain about ALL THE TIME.
Don’t just add people to your group. The invite function is a bit misleading as it automatically adds people to the group.
The best way around this is to message a few select people and invite them to join, share the link with them. This way the choice is theirs.

I hope it clears things up, I know it can get confusing when you haven’t used Facebook much before or you have gone from being an everyday user to a business owner!