Facebook group or Facebook page for your church?

Jeff Wilson is Pastor of Communication/Innovation at Henderson Hills, and recently gave a talk on using Facebook for ministry.

Jeff and I have been brainstorming some of the pros and cons of Facebook groups versus fan pages.  And what a killer Facebook app might look like for a church - taking the best benefits of both groups and pages, and filling the feature gaps that a custom app can deliver.

Benefits of a Page:

-    Can be accessed outside of Facebook; and thus a good outreach tool

-    Can promote it with targeted Facebook Social Ads and measure traffic stats

-    Can add 3^rd party apps (like a blog RSS reader)

-    Can set access controls to let members post to the page (ex. videos, photos) or to only let the admin post

 

Limitations of a Page:

-    Can’t message everyone – can only send out an update which doesn’t alert users by email (and rarely gets seen)

-    Can’t remove members from a page or limit who can join

-    Conversations and content cannot be made private

 

Benefits of a Group:

-    Can send an email message out to everyone

-    Native apps (photos, links, videos, message board, events) are sufficient for broadcasting content/info

-    Can remove and limit members from joining the group

-    Can set access controls to let members post to the group (ex. events, discussions, photos) or to only let the admin post

 

Limitations of a Group:

-    Native apps good for broadcasting, but not good for many-to-many communication (ie very little participation from members)

-    Can’t add additional functionality with 3^rd party apps

-    Members don’t get updated when there’s new content (either through email or news feed)

-    Groups are more hidden (than Pages) on a user’s Profile info tab and are less likely to be noticed by a church member’s friends

 

 

Limitations of both (opportunities for an app?):

-    Allow sub-groups for ministries and community groups within the larger church body

-    Announcements via SMS text messaging to all church members

-    Email notifications for other communications (ex. new church member)

-    Other apps that make sense for a church (ex. classifieds board)

-    Feed updates to all church members for posts, regardless of whether you’re friends with the person who posted

So is your church using a group, fan page, both, or neither?  What do you think is the best fit for a church community?

If there are other benefits/limitations of groups and pages for a church, feel free to comment and I'll update the post.

- Joe Suh from MyChurch

Comments

[Bob Wriedt]

Great topic to bring up. We were not intentional at the beginning, and so we need to figure out where to go in the midst of already have multiple groups in place. Do we close those groups and ask everyone to become a fan of the page?

Also, one thing to consider with groups is how many you want to create within a church culture. We have a college group group, a young adults group group, a group for our worship service... should we also have a general church group?

[Daniel Berman]

I am the webmaster for the Issachar Network. (www.issacharnetwork.org), I started a facebook group which garnered a lot of members but very little actual discussion or interaction. I also began to get the sense that I was investing in two different pieces of community real-estate, the site and facebook.

I decided to convert the group into a page for the third part apps, but to be perfectly honest we are still stalled at just over 100 members. I am not entirely sure its facebook's fault, but this has been my experience so far atleast.

[Kevin]

We were just discussing this at Oasis Church (www.visitoasis.org). I'm leaning towards a page for the church and groups for each of our three campuses. There will be some redundancies, but we would have different people running each. We're starting with a page for now.

Here's an interesting blog by my friend Matthew on how you might find who is on facebook in your church already:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techlesia/~3/7EuGRZ_Wmkk/

Kevin.

[Matt Harrell]

This is an excellent break down of using Facebook groups or pages. I'm personally still new to Facebook and haven't found the groups feature all that useful yet. Have you ever heard of MemberHub.com? We're a new start up and are just now spreading the word. Through the use of online "hubs" churches are creating community and helping ministries, small groups and members connect in a private and secure manner. It has mailing lists, SMS/text messaging, file sharing, and much more coming. Check it out!

[Greg Davis]

At our church we are using a fan page for the church as a whole and the Student Ministry is using a group. We have other ChMS software & services for doing mass emailing and texting. I would be nice if we could find "one stop shopping" in one place, but I expect we will always have a combination of communication tools.

[Brett]

You actually can send email updates to your pages' Fans. In fact, you can even target the update to specific countries, states, & cities, as well as male, female, & age ranges.

We created a Page for CLC a couple weeks ago and have had pretty good luck w/ it. The trick is getting good content out there on a regular but not annoying basis.

http://www.facebook.com/christianlifecenter