If you are just getting started newly to establish an online presence of your company on Facebook, you may get confused about a personal profile, a group and a page. It is common for new users to mistake personal profile for Facebook page. And some people would start a group when a page would have been better off.

Let’s take a quick look at the distinction between these three.

A personal profile refers to your personal Facebook account. In other words, a profile account represents a real individual (according to Facebook rules) and not a company or its offerings. Most Facebook users have personal profile account and this is what they use in socializing with friends on Facebook platform.

It is common to see someone creating a personal profile account to promote a business – perhaps you’ve received a friend invitation from users such as "Metroville Autos" which represents a company’s name. Facebook’s terms of service is against using personal profile for business promotion – in fact, this kind of profile would eventually be deleted. Now, you can change a personal profile to a page if you are in the category of users mentioned above, Facebook has luckily included an option to achieve this.

However, bear in mind that you must first own a personal profile account on Facebook before you can create a group or Page. If you own or represent a company, it is better to limit ‘friends’ acceptance on your personal profile to only those you truly know. Here’s the major distinction, a personal profile is intended to be a more private outlet for basically ‘sharing’ with only those who you are familiar with, while the groups and pages are intended to take care of large number of people, which can include those you do not know.

Facebook Page: This is created to cater for brands, products, public officials and celebrities promotion/marketing. Using Facebook page, large number of users can ‘like’ the page and receive news and info update from the page administrator, and also embark on interaction with others who ‘liked’ the page. As a Facebook page administrator, whatever you post on the page would be featured in people’s profiles news stream – these are people who ‘liked’ your page. In essence, if the number of your likes is up to 15,000, whatever post you make on the page would be passed across to these 15,000 people. The post is featured on their news stream – but some may not likely see the post.

Facebook Group: Facebook pages have their own functions. However, they do not provide the same level of innovative marketing options that pages offer. You can decide to make page a private thing and restrict it to only closer-knit who are possibly members of an identifiable organization such as a social organization. A standout benefit of group is that the administrator can send bulk message to group members – this is a feature you won’t find with Facebook Page. However, Facebook page is still the best for a business.