Facebook Pages are a great marketing tool. It’s allows you to amass hundreds to thousands of fans, and with the click of a button, disseminate information to them. At Inigral, we encourage all of our customers to continue to promote and manage their Facebook Pages after deploying Schools on Facebook on their campus, as Pages attract a wide variety of fans that all want to stay up-to-date with what’s going on at their institution.

Alongside of this marketing effort, building community amongst targeted groups within your diverse audience is a key goal. It allows universities to make admitted students and current students feel as if they belong at their institution. Typically, colleges have done this through using Facebook Groups for a class of incoming freshman (e.g. Class of 2014, etc…). This is a nice, free compliment to Facebook Pages, and allows a small group of admitted students to come into a centralized place for students to congregate. Here are some other benefits:

• Ability to make group private
• Have discussions
• Upload video and photos
• Easily view group administrators
• Assign different roles to group administrators

While Facebook Groups are a good start to getting more out of Facebook, there are some limitations for colleges and universities who want to use Facebook to impact business goals like yield and retention.

• Lots of work
• Students (or administrators) have to manually create discussions
• Students have to stumble upon others like them
• Administrators have to manually check the Group often for maintenance
• Facebook has access to and owns all data within the group (dorm addresses, class schedules, phone numbers, etc..)

Speaking with hundreds of administrators across the country has given us great insight into administrative concerns. A reoccurring theme we hear is around saving time, and having less work to do when managing social media. As a result. we’ve designed Schools on Facebook to do everything that Facebook Groups does, in a more efficient way, plus much more. Here are some key differences between Schools on Facebook and Facebook Groups:

• Your institution own all data generated inside of the application, not Facebook
• Students are automatically introduced to other students like them
• Advanced moderation capabilities (keyword alerts, private messaging) to save your staff time
• Campus-specific Facebook profiles for students, faculty, and staff
• Intelligent support for majors, dorms, and other official campus affiliations

To learn more about Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, and how they differ from Facebook Applications like Schools on Facebook, check out our Frequently Asked Questions.