Much has been written about the Fan Page vs.
Group Page debate on Facebook.
As far as "business" goes though, there's no debate anymore.
If you want a business page on Facebook, your best bet would be a Fan page, not a Group.
It seems the debate has irritated Facebook, because it increasingly has made a Group more like a personal page to further discourage its use as a business page.
At the same time it continues to increase and improve the business features available for a Fan page and eliminate many of the advantages Groups used to have.
However, if you still insist on having your business page as a Group, be prepared to deal with these shortcomings: - Members Hardly Know You Exist: This is the biggest shortcoming of a Group.
Updates you make on your group wall DO NOT show up in members' news feed.
With a fan page, all updates show up in members' news feed so long as they have adjusted their settings to receive these updates - Messaging Members Is A Problem: Once you have more than 5,000 members in your group, Facebook considers you a potential spammer.
Therefore, you cannot send messages to ANY of your group members.
Essentially, this means you cannot have more than 5,000 members in your group, which does not happen with a fan page - Non-Indexing By Search Engines: If your business is a "closed" group, then it will not show up in search results when someone searches for it.
Honestly, it's hard to imagine why a business would want to be a closed group on Facebook unless it has some intellectual property to protect - No Visitor Stats/Analytics: There's a saying in business that "if you can't measure it, then you can't improve it.
" Facebook provides visitor stats for a Fan page but not for a Group, so you have no idea who's visiting your page and what they're doing there - Limited Business Promotion Tools: Facebook provides administrators of Fan pages many tools - Social Ads, Badges, Fan Box, etc.
- to promote their business on and off Facebook.
This is not the case with groups - Lack of Applications: A Facebook fan page is like an iPhone.
There are hundreds of applications available to use with it.
This is not the case with Groups.
If you are a business owner or corporate manager considering a business page on Facebook, you can see it's a no-brainer which is more appropriate.
In the not so distant future, a Facebook Fan page will probably look more like a website where you can engage members with a lot of persuasive content, while a Group will look more a microsite.