What is a fan page?
Facebook Pages can be thought of in much the same way as normal profiles on the site – brand or celebrity Pages have the ability to have friends, they can add pictures, and they have walls that fans can post on. Pages communicate by “updates” which show on the update tab or a person’s wall if they’re a fan and have allowed the page to show updates. Pages can have applications as well.
What is a group?
Groups are a bit different than Pages. I administer an alumni group on Facebook. To create a group you go to facebook.com/groups/create.php and then fill in information about the type of group, and decide if it is open to a particular network (such as a University network) or all of Facebook. You can set join permissions on groups so that they are either open to anyone, closed (where users must get administrator approval to join) or secret (invite only). Groups have administrators that manage the group, approve applicants or invite others to join. Administrators can also appoint “officers” who are nominally in charge – however, being an officer doesn’t mean the person has the ability to administer the group.
Because of these privacy settings, Facebook’s groups are analogous to clubs in the offline world. Administrators can invite members to join via Facebook mail and email, and public groups can be found via Facebook search.
Advantages of Group:
-Can send Email blasts (so long as usercount <5000)
-Far more complex hierarchal control
Disadvantages of Group:
-There are NO updates to your "status feed"
People familiar with Facebook recognize the value of status feed updates. They are the sole reason for fanpages. Groups are for closer knit individuals who are working together to schedule meetings, share ideas via email, etc. Having a facebook group may be viable for increasing productivity within the leadership of imminst, however it will cause a divide between those of us on the forums and those of us primarily on facebook. Imminst members looking to be productive will naturally go toward either the forums or the Facebook. We want to stay together and keep everyone in one place. Moving everyone to Facebook is NOT the right thing to do for a multitudue of reasons (Facebook blocked at work/school, time to get everyone over there, waste of time etc).
It is very important for everyone to recognize that the purpose of Facebook is primarily to raise awareness and increasing our following. This is going to be achieved through viral marketing (more on that later).
To do this we HAVE to have a fan page. We need to have a fanpage up and going in the next 2 weeks with stable admins who will be updating is continuously.(QUICK). I know that as of right now we have a Facebook fan page, however the administrators are nowhere to be found.
I'm going to wait 1 week- If we haven't contacted the original imminst fan page administrators, we are going to have to create a new one and begin promotions of that new fan page instead.