Hello, and welcome to today’s episode of Business Foundations for Mums. Today, first of all I have to apologise for my voice. I had lost my voice a few days ago, and it’s had all sorts of different and strange sounds but I’m currently still struggling with a very sore throat, blocked ears, blocked nose, but needs must so recording has to go on. So hopefully it won’t affect the sound quality too much of the recording today and it’s certainly not conducive with good vocal quality, but hopefully you’ll still be able to hear me clearly enough.

So today I wanted to talk about the difference between Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups, for business. I get a lot of people, I hear a lot of people, asking in different places, should I have a Facebook page or should I have a Facebook group? And the answer really depends on what it is that you want to achieve. And the answer is also that you can have both, you don’t have to have one or the other. You can have both. But first of all, just to give you a really quick analogy about the difference between a Facebook page and a Facebook group just to really get a really basic overview of what the difference is people often compare Facebook pages and Facebook groups with shops. And an analogy that I’ve heard used many, many times is that Facebook page is effectively like your shopfront. It’s everything that people see as they walk past your shop front. It’s all of the things that you’re displaying in the window display. It’s your signage outside, it’s any A-boards, you might have telling people what’s going on at the moment. So it’s that very sort of first impression that people will get of your business. It’s that public view that anybody can see.

However, a Facebook group is more like the reception that you would get if you went into a shop and started engaging with the shop owner, talking to them in a lot more depth about what they do, what they deliver, what their products are, finding out about the provenance, going into a lot more depth about how those products could potentially help you. It’s about building that relationship. So from the point of view of you as a business owner, a group gives you a lot more options to get to know and engage with your customers than a Facebook page would. A Facebook page is there to show things off to show it to the wider public and it is visible to the wider public to everybody and anybody but the Facebook group is there for those who are already more engaged, more interested showing more of an interest in what you do. And they’re the people who would be interested enough to come and actively request to join your group.

So to talk first of all about Facebook pages. A Facebook page is public. There is no way of making a Facebook page private or hiding things on a Facebook page. It is there for all the world to see not just within Facebook, but the contents of your Facebook page can potentially appear on Google searches as well if it’s relevant enough and significant enough that it has the right SEO features. It’s your profile of your business and it’s where you post about your business, and about other content that’s relevant to your customers. And often those posts are going to a cold audience. They’re often going to those who are new to you who don’t know much about you, or maybe who haven’t been engaged enough to come and interact with you on a further level.

So when you set up your page, and one of the first things that you have the option to do is to set up your category and there are all sorts of different categories that you can set up and effectively a category is to say what it is that your business does, what it is that your business offers, what kind of business is it? Facebook pages have absolutely tonnes of really useful features. So to say it’s a shop front is probably quite basic because there’s actually lots of things you can do with that shop front, with that page. You can feature a shop on your Facebook page so customers can actually buy directly from your Facebook page. You can communicate with your customers via Facebook Messenger through that page so you can get into interactive one to one conversations with people and people can message your page directly and you can respond to those messages. Interestingly with Facebook pages, you cannot reach out to somebody from a Facebook page unless they have already connected and communicated with you.

So with Facebook pages, you can integrate a number of different Facebook apps that are available as well which have all sorts of features so you can have features such as booking appointments, making reservations, there are apps on there if you’re a food business and you offer an ordering service, you can have food ordering apps that link up with your page. The other things that you can do on your page is have a variety of different call to actions. You get one main button at the top of your Facebook page that gives people the opportunity to connect with you in some way and you can choose what that button is going to be. It could be that you direct people to send you a message, it could be to call you, to WhatsApp you, it could be to interact in some other way. There’s a whole variety of different options of different ways that people can get in contact with you via your Facebook page. You can also schedule content onto Facebook pages, which is a really useful feature so you can batch create your content in advance and you can schedule it all onto the page. The other benefit of Facebook pages which you don’t have in a Facebook group, is that you can link your Facebook page to an Instagram page as well. And that way you can cross post between the two. You can create content on your Facebook page which you can post directly to Instagram. You can create content on your Instagram page, which you can share directly onto your Facebook page and equally you can schedule your content in advance to post on to both at the same or different times or different kinds of posts. If your business is location based, you can also select your location to show up on your Facebook page, as well as your opening hours if you have a specific shop for example, if you have a physical location and you want people to know the times when you’re open and when they can come to your venue, then you can show all of those on Facebook on your Facebook page.

Equally, if you’re not a business that has a physical location, you can still show the hours that you’re available for people to contact you. There are a number of different tabs that are available on a Facebook page and you can choose which of these you want to show, and which you don’t. There’s a couple that are there and a non negotiable and you can’t remove but the vast majority of them you can so for example you can choose if you do have a Facebook group, to link that Facebook group to your page. And you can show that group on your page. So when people go onto your page, they can see the group that you also have. You can select to show events, so if you ever do have events as part of your page or part of your business, you can promote them via the events section of your page. Events will show to anybody who is on Facebook. Anybody who goes to your page will be able to view those events so you cannot restrict the privacy of those events. If you’re putting them onto your page. You can also choose to have reviews available as an option for people to leave reviews and for people to view your reviews. So that can be a really good way to promote your business as well. Videos is another one if you have produced any videos or posted any videos at all, you can choose to have those showing on your page. And podcasts, if you have a podcast you can link the RSS feed of your podcast and you can then have that available as a tab for people to select and listen directly through Facebook. That’s quite a new feature. Your photos, about your business are sections which will be on your page regardless, but there’s also a community section and again, this is optional, but in a community section this will show where other businesses or other people have tagged your page in a post, where other people have talked about you or, posted directly onto your page about you. So this is where your community can start to interact and contribute to your page as well.

You can show your services on Facebook as well on your page. You can have a shop that lists the items that you have for sale and people can go in directly and purchase them from you and you can link up Facebook’s payment processor with your payment processors or with your bank service and get payments made directly to you. And you can also have a live section, and that’s where previous live videos will show up on your Facebook page as well. Facebook pages you can have a variety of people who interact on them. So as the person who runs the page, you are the page admin. There are various different roles that people can play on your page. So if you are a self business owner, you will be the admin if you set up your page yourself. I always advise people to have a second admin on there because an admin is the only person who is able to add and remove other people from the page. And if you for some reason, get blocked from Facebook or locked out of the page in one way or another. It is really useful to have a second admin, who can let you back in it’s happened to a couple of people I know where they have been locked out of their own Facebook page and can’t get back in, and if a second person is an admin, it’s a really good way to just have that backup in place. You can also have editors and moderators who have different degrees and levels of control that they have over the content that’s posted and the comments and things like that. And there are other roles on there as well. So for example if you employ someone to do advertising on your behalf, you can add an advertiser, you can you can add an analyst who just gets to see the analytics of your Facebook page.

You can also choose all sorts of different features within the settings. So there’s there’s far too much to go into now around the settings but one of the features that I think is really useful just to check out, is whether to allow other businesses to tag you or not. It’s certainly really, really useful to have other businesses who you collaborate with being able to tag you in posts because if you don’t allow people to tag you, they can’t tag you to share your business, to promote you, to talk about you, to recommend you so it’s really great to allow tags of your business.

You can also manage those who follow you. So if somebody is trolling your business, you can go in there and block them which is really really useful. And also if you’re going to have Facebook ads, your business page is where you want to be doing it from. Facebook ads is linked to your Facebook page. So you’re not promoting stuff as an individual when you do an ad. They’re not promoting stuff from your group. It’s only from your page that you would be able to do ads.

So on to groups now, groups have been around since around 2010. So back in 2017, 2018, Facebook started getting quite a lot of slack for being far too business focused. People were joining Facebook to interact with their friends and their contacts to uh “You want to come and be on Facebook where you can find out all about what your friends are doing and keep in touch with each other.” And that side of things was really starting to fall and we were seeing more and more and more posts from businesses. Facebook was becoming too business focused and they were losing a lot of customers as a result they were losing a lot of people from the platform. So around 2017 and 2018 Facebook announced that they were going to encourage meaningful social interactions. So that means that posts from groups were given a lot more weight in your feed than posts from pages and that’s pretty much the way it’s carried on since then. So groups are places where you can engage with others. who share common interests. So those interests could be geographical interests, business interests, social, hobbies, political, health, habits, communities, all sorts of different things, problems.

So for example, just to give you examples of a few of, just few of the groups, I mean, I don’t even know how many groups I’m in I’m in a lot of groups but to give you examples of some of the ones that I’m in and engage with on a regular basis. I’m in a group for my local village, I’m in a group for the village where my children are at school. The look of the town which is most local to me, I’m in selling groups for some of the local areas as well. So if people are buying and selling things then I will get to see the posts from those groups potentially if it’s something Facebook thinks might interest me or if I decide to go to those groups and scroll through. I’m in local business groups. I’m in a group that’s related to my school PTA. I’m in a variety of groups for hobbies that I’m interested in. I’m in a genealogy group that’s really interesting. I’m in a group about decluttering. And there’s so many different groups.

From a business perspective. I’m in lots of VA groups, lots of groups for virtual assistants, and they are really, really valuable. They’re probably the ones I see the most from but also the ones that I look at the most and engage in the most there’s some really great stuff out there from a business perspective. I’m in the local business mum groups because that’s where I am trying to seek my clients, where I’m looking for new potential clients to work with. I’m in groups for apps that I’m I use on a regular basis and bits of software that I use and they’re really great places if you’re trying to troubleshoot an issue with an app or a bit of software that you use on a regular basis. It’s really good to be able to go in and say I’ve got this particular problems. Anyone else struggling with that, or in the VA groups when there’s a particular glitch on Facebook going on. People can go on and discuss that stuff. And you can see that it’s not just you that struggling with that, everyone’s having the same issue or somebody can give you a tip on how to solve a problem. There’s some really fantastic groups out there so groups are a place that I definitely get a huge amount of value from.

So going back to that shop analogy that we talked about at the beginning, groups are places where you can go in beyond the shop front and actually start to engage with people, actually start to have conversations, actually provide meaningful answers for people and also ask questions and seek meaningful answers from people. They’re a really great place to interact with other people. Groups are also often used by memberships either in a free or a paid capacity. So I am part of a couple of memberships that are delivered through a private Facebook group. So I pay for my membership. And as a paying member, I have access to that private group. And in some of them that’s just a place for discussion around the content of the membership, but in some of the groups that I’m in, that’s the place where the content is delivered as well and I’ll talk in a moment about some of the different ways that you can deliver content in a group. There’s some really good ways to do that. You have a lot more control about who is in your group. A Facebook page is visible to anyone but in a Facebook group. You can choose who is going to be in that group as well. Depending on the level of privacy of your group, you can choose who’s allowed to contribute to the group who can post who can see the post. You can choose to approve posts before they go out so you can actually look at every single post and see if they’re suitable, see if they’re acceptable and then agree to post them if they are or decline them if they’re not. You can select who the members of your group are going to be and you get the option to ask a number of questions and also ask people to tick a box to say that they agree to the group rules before you let people in and if people don’t answer the questions or people don’t answer the questions with the correct answers, then you don’t necessarily need to let them in. So I’ve been in groups that I’ve been declined from before. If I’ve got a particular interest in an area, sometimes you know localised groups will require that you actually live in a very specific area before they let you in because they don’t want all sorts of people from further afield advertising in their group, or coming into their group. So you have a lot of control over who is part of your group and the kind of content that can be in there.

The other thing that you have with groups is the different levels of privacy. So there are public groups. There aren’t that many public groups that I’ve come across there’s, there’s plenty out there. But when you look at groups as a whole, the vast majority are closed, which is the middle level of public groups. Anyone can can go into a public group, anyone can see the posts in there and whether you can actually post yourself in there or not depends on the rules of that group. A closed group is a group that you can search and you can come across that group, you can find them, they’re visible to you but only the about section and the basic information section of that group is visible to you, if you’re not a member. As a non member, you can click and see who the members are. You can see how many members there are, how frequently people post in the group and the about blurb about it. But unless you’re accepted as a member, you can’t see the actual posts within that group. And the other type of group is a secret group. And a secret group, if you were to search for that group name, it wouldn’t come up, the only way you can join a secret group is if you are invited to join that group. So only people within the group and sometimes only the admins can actually invite other people to join that secret group. It’s not visible to the wider public, they don’t even know it exists. One of the things that prompted me to do this post was that I saw a brilliant post in a local group, in a local village group, quite recently, which was from somebody who wrote a lovely, I think you’d probably call it a poem, about the sharing within private groups from private groups. 

If you post something in a private group, you cannot share that outside that group. It cannot be shared by any member of that group or yourself outside that group. And one thing that I see all the time is in a number of private groups. People will say Oh, please could you make this shareable so that I can? Oh, please, can you change your privacy settings so I can share it? No, you can’t. It’s that simple. It’s a private group. posts in private groups cannot be shared outside that group. And the reason for that is that again, this meaningful social interaction that Facebook really wants to encourage includes the fact that people can engage with each other meaningfully. And people can engage with each other in a way that if it’s private, if it’s something that is happening within that community, it should stay within that community. It’s not there for the wider public, if it was posted for the wider public, it will be posted on a page or in a public group. The fact that it has been posted in a private group suggests that it’s not been posted with the aim of it being shared more widely. So you can’t share from private groups or from secret groups. So a lot of groups will have confidentiality rules within them. I’m in a couple of groups which relate to learning difficulties for children, because of one of my children. And a lot of the posts in there are very personal and you wouldn’t want to share them. People wouldn’t want those kinds of really deep personal things to be shared. So confidentiality is a really, really important part of groups like that. And people I’ve seen on more than one occasion in various groups I’m in where people have been removed from groups because they’ve broken the confidentiality within that group. And they’ve shared what’s been said in the group with a wider audience in one way or another.

Groups can also be really, really useful as pop up groups. I’ve done one recently. So I recently did my business planning challenge. I did it in a pop up group. The group was specifically for the business planning challenge and specifically for the duration of that challenge. And as a result, at the end of that time, you can just archive that group. You don’t need to close it entirely. You can archive it, it will still keep its members if they choose to stay in it. And then when you come to do that challenge again in the future, you can reactivate that group, you can bring it out the archives set it up again, but while it’s archived, it means that nobody else can post in it, you can’t post in it. It’s, it’s effectively a silenced group at the time that it’s archived.

Events can be really useful within a group as well. So if you want to have an event that is only available to the people within that group, if you post it in a private group, it is only, it only shows to the people within that group. It won’t show to anyone outside that group. So that can be a really useful feature as well. And Facebook also quite recently has created, or probably, that probably within the last couple of years has created rooms. The rooms are a place where a number of people can meet on a video call and all talk to each other. One of the things that you can use and this is where it’s can be really useful if you have a membership or a course or something that you’re delivering through a Facebook group is topics, and topics effectively are hashtags which are used within that group. So if anyone uses a hashtag, then that hashtag becomes a topic. So if you have specific topics that are spoken about on a regular basis, it’s really useful, you can group those different posts together, by using that same hashtag. So if you for example, do a business tip once a week, you could do hashtag business tip and then people can go and search for that hashtag and they can see all of the business tips that you’ve got within that topic. Files are another really useful feature of having particularly if you have a course or a membership, because files you can upload files to the Facebook group. Not all files are uploaded but set only certain file types that you can upload but you can upload video files, you can upload PDFs, I believe you can upload Word documents, so you can upload all sorts of different things. So if you’re delivering some kind of course content you can upload your video content for the course you can upload your PDF workbooks and all those different things and you can have all of those files available for your audience.

So as I mentioned at the beginning with the shop analogy, groups are really that place where you start to bring people into a much deeper level of engagement. They’re a place to build engagement, to grow trust with your audience. They’re a place where you can start to engage with your members on a deeper level on a more personal level, and start interacting. Market research is something it’s really great to do in a group as well. But another type of group a completely different type of group is a selling group. So you may be we may have seen selling groups for your area. Those are groups, they are groups of people within a certain area and you can go in and you can buy and sell products, often within certain parameters or rules or certain geographical areas. But those are really useful and they’re a type of group as well. And I’m certainly gonna give you a top tip, so that if you use sell a product, I wouldn’t necessarily set up a selling group and set up a group where you can build engagement with your target market. It might be that you’re thinking “I just want to set up a group where I can sell my products.” But if you’re doing that, then you’re only you’re restricting your sales to those who are in your group. So actually, if you do have a particular product to sell, I would definitely suggest that you make your products available to sell on your page rather than on your group. However, create a group that will start to engage your clients it will start to get them to invest in you remember that people buy from people.

So going back to an episode a couple of episodes ago when we talked about your ideal client. Think about your ideal client. If you, if you’re struggling to think about what you can set up a group about, think about your ideal client, what is the problem that they have? What is the problem that you can help them with in some way? And how can you create a group with some kind of solidarity around this? To give you an example as a virtual assistant I don’t want to set up a group specifically about creating mailing lists, or I mean the various different things that I offer a number of services and I haven’t really got, I can’t really create a group that just sells those services or just talks about those services. I wanted to deliver something that was really specific to my audience and will be specifically helpful to the kind of people who might also find my virtual assistant services really useful as well. So with that in mind, I set up a group that supports mums in business to get more organised in their lives in their personal lives as well as their business lives and find different tips and tricks to help people to be more organised, whether that be decluttering a bit more in your home, whether it be a specific shopping list template, that’s really helpful. So all sorts of different tips and tricks to help mums who run their business to be more organised in both areas of their lives.

So really to summarise with Facebook groups and Facebook pages. The question should you have a Facebook group or a Facebook page, could have both. But think about what you want to achieve for it. Is it getting people to really engage with you, in which case a group is probably a better place to start building that engagement. Or do you just want to showcase your services to new people, and your products? So if that’s the case, then a page is the way to go. And if you want to do both of those things, and you want to use your page to bring new people to you and showcase what you do, and then drive them to that closer level of engagement through a group so you could have both of those things. You can link a Facebook page and a Facebook group together. And what you can do which is really useful, is that you can post once your Facebook page and your group are linked. You can then post as your business within your group. So I could go into a Facebook group that was part of Business Foundations for Mums. And rather than me posting as Kate Butcher I could post as Business Foundations for Mums, create a post saying blah, blah, blah, blah.

So you can have both there’s no reason why you can’t have both. It can be really valuable to have both have a real think about which one would be more beneficial for you. You’re not restricted to one of you. Hopefully that’s been useful and helping you to figure out whether a Facebook page or a Facebook group is the right thing for you. Let me know if you found it useful.

Find shownotes, and Listen to the episode here

Or watch on YouTube