Using Facebook Groups to Market?

teams-groupMarketers are asking if the new Facebook Groups will be valuable for marketing.

As Facebook continues to innovate ways for consumers to track and build relationships through their social graph, smart marketers are looking beyond ads for ways to engage their customers

Groups differ from Pages in a few key ways. Unlike Facebook Pages, Groups are not a communications channel designed for brand marketing. Pages allow you to communicate with Facebook users who are your fans – in other words, users who have opted in to receive promotional content that you publish from your Facebook Page via their news feed. Groups, on the other hand, are organizations of Facebook users who have opted in to receive content from (or create content for) their peers with whom they share a special interest or element of identity.

As a channel designed for marketing, Pages offer numerous ways to broadcast to and communicate with users who are fans and with those users’ friends. With a Group, however, admins can send messages to members, but, aside from invites from members, there are no viral acquisition mechanisms to bring new users to the Group.

Why then, are Groups valuable to marketers? Pages allow you two-way communication with Facebook users who are your fans or friends of your fans — they are Facebook’s premier brand marketing tool. Facebook Ads allow you one-way communication with users who are not yet your fans, but whose profile information matches that of your target audience. Groups are different from, and complementary to, both of these options because Groups, if used wisely and sparingly, allow you to communicate in a personal, bi-directional way with Facebook users who are not your fans, but who could be.

Read more at InsideFacebook.com