Why You Should Convert your Facebook Groups to Pages

Over the past few weeks, it’s safe to say that I’ve become slightly obsessed with Facebook Pages. I love them – and in the course of two weeks, I have made and worked on 6 pages. Most of the pages that I made were formerly Facebook Groups, and so it’s been a bit of a slow process of getting everyone to move over to the page, but it’s been well worth it.

The first page I made was for Presbymergent. I wasn’t sure if people would all come on over to the new Page, but within a week – we had everyone over on the Page. Before the group had about 960 members – but we are sitting pretty with about 1,214 Fans of Presbymergent right now. One of the first things we noticed almost immediately after creating the page was the level of interaction shot WAY up on the page. People were “liking” and commenting on almost all of our Status Updates and people were engaging with one another. That rarely happened in the Facebook Group, and so that was the most encouraging thing as we began.

After seeing the success of moving from a Group to a Page, I’ve been working on converting other Groups that I use for our church to pages. I’ll admit that I’ve been quite obsessive with gaining enough Fans to grab a custom username (so much so that I asked one of my youth to become a Fan of the Young Adults group so that we could hit the magic number of 25 fans in order to get the username). I’m pretty happy with the URLs that I’ve been able to secure:

• facebook.com/Presbymergent
• facebook.com/CovNetPres
• facebook.com/AsburyUMC (there are a LOT of Asbury United Methodist Churches…but we got Asbury UMC first on Facebook!)
• facebook.com/AsburyYouth
• facebook.com/AsburyYoungAdults
• facebook.com/Tweetup (yes, that’s right. We got Tweetup for the Tri-Valley Tweetup page – that was a major score!)
• And lastly, I’m working on getting 25 fans so I can secure facebook.com/TheologyPub next

Some wonder why you’d want a custom username for your page. Well – there are a couple reasons:

• When I advertise for our Theology Pub, I want to be able to put www.facebook.com/TheologyPub on a poster, instead of http://www.facebook.com/pages/Livermore-CA/Theology-Pub/173984462976
• Google likes it better
• It’s easier for people to remember so they can tell their friends
• It’s just cool

So, if you’re wondering why you should convert your group (whether it’s a very active group or not), here is why you should:

1. Greater interaction from fans
2. Easier way of getting information to them (anything you post as a status update, video, link, etc.) will show up in their Newsfeed (don’t abuse this though)
3. You can target Updates to Fans (based on location/gender/age) when you send out updates
4. Ability to have a custom username
5. Ability to connect your Facebook Page to Twitter (anything you post on the Facebook Page will get posted on Twitter as well)
6. Facebook is putting energy into Pages now – not groups. Better to get on board early with Pages!

Now – the question is: Why are you still reading this post? Hurry up and convert those old, boring Facebook Groups to Facebook Fan Pages! Start creating here!

Related posts:

• Pomomusings is now on Facebook!
• Follow @presbymergent to Get Updates
• A Brief History of Presbymergent: Part 1
• A Brief History of Presbymergent: Part 3

Tagged as: Facebook, Facebook Pages, Networking, social media, Social-Networking, Twitter