Facebook is a fantastic platform – a medium that has captured the imagination of more than 10% of the world’s population.
But there’s one thing that annoys us above anything else about it, and that’s the lack of compatibility between Groups and Pages. Groups were the way to do it originally and accrued hundreds of thousands of members, but Pages were revamped and are now far superior, offering Facebook’s own internal analytics (Insights), instant advertising and a fantastic API. There’s no doubt that while Facebook Pages gain social traction, Group owners are bogged down deleting spam wall posts.
Facebook’s official line is that group owners should set up a Page and message their members to let them know. But this is far from ideal – there’s no short hand way to track who’s moved and who hasn’t and what of those who don’t login often? To add insult to injury, group messaging is not possible for groups of more than 5,000 members, which is not big.
It’s not a deal-breaker, but not being able to convert from Groups to Pages directly surely puts users off and as pages get better and better I’d imagine will lead to thousands of groups being abandoned.