Facebook has two distinct communities: Groups which are communities that are formed due to a common interest and Pages which are centered around giving publishers or celebrities a way to connect with their fans or readers.
Now Facebook is combining the two (sort of) by launching Groups for Pages as described by the company’s Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox in a post. “If you are an artist, a business, a brand or a newspaper, you can now create fan clubs and groups centered around your super-fans,” he said in the post. This feature will now allow the over 70 million Pages on Facebook to create their own fan clubs
Chris Cox gave an example of how the Washington Post was able to create a group called PostThis where the reporters talked directly to their avid fans. Apparently the fans loved it and this enabled the publisher to connect the newsroom with their fans.
From the screenshot above, these “fan clubs” will reside under the “Groups” tab in a Page carousel where a fan can join the various groups linked to the page. Pages will be able to link an existing Group to their Page too, which is great if you have already have a Group that has a sizeable following and engagement. However, it is not clear if there is a limit to the number of Groups that can be linked to a Page.
This is great since you can have different fan clubs within a Page. In the case for Publishers, you can have groups for the different genres the publisher writes content from, which would significantly increase the engagement stats of these Pages.
