Here’s the main deficiency I’ve seen of Facebook Fan Pages over Facebook Groups. With a fan page, you can post status updates. As Facebook continues to slowly hijack Twitter’s business model, the value of status messages continues to increase. Currently (and Facebook has not yet fixed this to my knowledge) this is the huge value of the Fan Page over the Group.
To my understanding, there are some downsides to the fan page. Using a fan page to create events is problematic as it only allows for inviting people that you are actually friends with. You can’t just invite anyone who is a fan of your page.
Also, there is the problem of ownership…let’s say you want to create a fan page, Facebook has made it ridiculously difficult to remove yourself as owner of the page. Not cool.
While groups are easier to deal with on both of those counts, I still believe the ability to post status updates makes the fan page more valuable. I’m sticking with the fan page.
you can “update” your fans about an event, which does, essentially, the same thing as inviting them by sending them an email that they can choose to ignore. I personally like the fan page more, as well, since it allows for dialogue through the wall posts with your fans.
You’re speaking my language, Terry. I think that dialogue is critical if you do choose to go either direction, but I think the fan page is far more conducive to that conversation.