Marketers 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.
Why would anyone waste time playing a silly game on Facebook?
That’s what the majority of users are saying.
But think for a moment about the small part that does play. By “Small” I mean 75,000,000 users on Farmville.
Facebook now has team working on marketing with games, developing ways to make the user experience better. Targeted ads, to be sure.. but also connecting people similar interest
People who use Facebook either tend to tell us that they love playing games or hate them, and we haven’t had the right tools to enable developers to grow their games while at the same time providing a great user experience for non-gamers. We’re building more sophisticated tools that will allow us all to be more successful against those goals.
For game players, here are some improvements we’re excited to be launching today:
Full stories in News Feed so they won’t miss when a friend shares an action or needs help in a game. The more active a person is in a game, the more prominent the stories will be.
Smarter bookmarks on the home page that will automatically appear and reorder based on the games they’re playing. They will no longer need to individually bookmark apps, and it will be easier to get to favorite apps.
A clearer, highlighted number for pending requests or tasks alongside bookmarks.
Requests in the Games Dashboard, where they can manage all their game activity and discover new games.
Marketers are asking if the new Facebook Groups will be valuable for marketing. 
But think for a moment about the small part that does play. By “Small” I mean 75,000,000 users on Farmville.