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For the past 5 years administrators of Facebook groups have not been able to change their names. As of today, that restriction is being removed amidst continued feedback from group admins who want the ability to do so. While it’s a seemingly small adjustment, it makes me wonder if we could soon see a mini-market for larger groups. At one point, having a large group was worth a large amount until the company place restrictions on the number of people you could message.
Facebook then reportedly removed that restriction but it’s now somewhat unclear how many people you can message within a group. I’ve reached out to Facebook for clarification and should hear back shortly. Facebook groups are still one of the primary tools for organizing individuals around a specific issue, activity, or general topic and despite its lack of customization features in compares to Facebook Pages, it’s remains to be one of the more effective promotional tools on the site.
I regularly receive inquiries from individuals who are trying to weigh the pros and cons of creating a Facebook group versus a Facebook page. Honestly, there is no clear cut solution. Even this site has fans that are split across a Facebook page and a group and it is a somewhat confusing predicament. As of today though, you can add one more “pro” to the group features: you can change their names, something that is not available on Facebook pages.
We’ll update this post when we hear back from Facebook. Do you prefer using Facebook Pages or Facebook groups currently?
Update
Facebook replied to our inquiry and let us know that the current messaging limit on groups is 5,000 users. Any groups over 5,000 can’t send out messages.
I prefer using Facebook pages because:
You could add application on it, which makes features unlimited on your page.
You could target your updates, so say if you want it to target it on teenagers, you could do that!
The pages’ photo can be bigger than groups
It’s easier for a person to become a fan of a page, rather than joining a group.
Fan pages are unlimited, but you could only join 300 groups
Fan photos and videos are isolated from the photos the page admin adds
Browsing through the Pages is so much easier than browsing through groups
You can delete a Facebook fan page
It tells what the admin has been doing on the page with the mini-feed so you could track what that admin is saying and doing if he’s someone important, e.g. footballer.
You could see all the updates that you have missed if you are a new fan
Most importantly, the page manager shows you the demographics of your page, percentages, growth, daily visits etc. and that’s really important when you are trying to make an ad campaign because you will know what’s your target
Facebook makes free ads for the Pages, on the ads section it will view the page and say something about the page, this only happens if some of your friends become fan of that page
But Groups also have some advantages like
You could invite your friends to the group (i know its annoying when it’s a random group, but it gets you going!)
You could have a closed group, accept only the ones you want
You can remove people on the group, something you cant do on the pages
It has the name of the admins on it (i know you can do that on Facebook pages, but some people dont know how to do it)
Group results come before pages if they have the same name
It has recent news (very important), I’m just wondering why facebook doesn’t add it to pages when pages need it more
Anyone disagrees with any point I’ve made, what do you prefer Nick, because you know more about Facebook than us
Thanks
I think they both have different purposes anyway!
Even better…. something you missed with all this change of “Group Names” is the fact that you can now change group NETWORKS.
So all those groups that were originally created in a college or regional network back in the day can now be opened to Global.
Pretty nifty. About time.
Facebook seems to be removing some of my pro-Israel friends from ALL their groups - is anyone else having these issues?
Pages and Groups served different purpose.
It’s good news to hear this features.
Btw, is there any way to transfer Facebook Pages ownership to other person?
Let say, I develop Pages for company, can I later transfer the ownership to them?
Allowing admins to add applications to Groups would give them some big advantages over Pages for certain applications. Any thoughts or rumors on this happening?
They added this feature about a week ago.
One of the reasons we began building Facebook apps in the first place was that we couldn’t rename a group. We had an event group that was year-specific and we didn’t want to have to start over each year that the event happened. Being able to change the group name would have been ideal, allowing us to retain our fanbase rather than starting from scratch each year. Yet wasn’t one of the reasons Facebook was against group renaming was that it could lead to abuse: you joined the group “Canadian Cooking” and then it was renamed to “Canadian XXX Cooking”?
http://so.ca/?p=104
After I make updates to my group page, how do I stop Facebook from sending an email to all the members of my group? I would prefer not to send annoying emails to others everytime I make an update. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Can you no longer change the name of your facebook group?
I have a fan group page on FACEBOOK that is called “I AM A HARRICANIAC” but it has been spelt wrong as it is supposed to say “I AM A HURRICANIAC” could this please be changed for me or could you please tell me how i could change it?
RE FACEBOOK GROUPS: how does one change a profile picture on a Groups Page? Can it be done?
can pages send messages to the fans? and if so is possible to send messages to pages with more than 5000 users?
Hi, would like to find out is there any way to turn facebook group to a facebook page?
i just created a group…sad to say i mispelled it..how can i edit the name of the group?