Step 1.

Figure out the difference between the two. Use the chart below to look at the differences between a Facebook Group and a Fan Page and figure out what works best for your organization. Whichever you choose, remember that moving people to take action beyond Facebook is a huge challenge, which depends a lot on the audience you are targeting, the kind of access to technology they have, what they care about, and more.

Step 2.

Ask yourself: who is your audience?

Groups can be created by a Facebook user about any topic and are intended for sharing information with a small subset of people like family or a social group, often who already know each other offline. Making a group for your organization or campaign depends a lot on the size of your group and the level of trust between members.

If you have a large base of supporters or are hoping to get one, you should create a page. 

Step 3. 

Look closer at the differences between the two before you make your final decision. Besides the information in the above chart, keep in mind that a group allows you to chat in real-time with other members using Facebook Chat and use the shared notepad to collaborate on documents. Groups can be open, closed, or secret. With a group, you have more control over who participates. It can be open to a particular network or to all of Facebook. You can set the group to closed so that the administrator's approval is required for a new member to join or secret so the group is unlisted and membership is private.

To create a page, you must be an official representative of a real organization or business. Pages are intended to help an organization communicate publicly with supporters. A page is similar to an individual profile: it has a wall, and page administrators can add photos, applications, and share "updates" that appear in the newsfeed of Facebook users who "like" your page. Individual Facebook users become Fans of pages by "liking" them. When a user "likes" a page by clicking the Like button, he or she connects to that Page. The page will be displayed on the Facebook user's profile, and the user will also be displayed on the Page as a person who likes that Page.

Tip!

Keep in mind this important difference between the way that a group notifies its members of new updates and the way that a page does. With a page, updates are mixed in with a user's news feed, so they don't stand out as much. These updates also come from the page admins only. With a group, the updates come from anyone in the group who decides to post information, and they show up in a user's notifications bar (at the top left of your Facebook home page) so that for now group updates are more likely to stand out. 

Step 4.

Remember that you can always create both, since a page is where you will be trying to increase the amount of fans you have and a group, on the other hand, is more about facilitating meaningful conversation/collaboration among a smaller subset of people. If you create a page, and then you notice that your audience contains sub groups which might benefit from more intimate conversation with one another, then you can create smaller groups to allow people to address particular issues.  If you notice that another organization with similar aims has already created a fan page and has many fans, you might want to approach them about partnering on the creation and management of a group for smaler discussions.

Keep in mind, then, that depending on the size and range of your audience it might make sense to have both a page and a group.

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