Facebook Groups is moving, is the sky falling?

Today I received an e-mail asking about Facebook Groups, and when I went to go and see what my friend was talking about and was greeted by

“This group is scheduled to be archived – Over the next few months, Facebook will be archiving all groups created using the old groups format. Moving forward, you can create groups using the new groups format, which makes it easy to share with the important groups in your life.”

So I decided to see what was going on to help others figure this out. The first fear was are we going to have to have a fan page, and the answer seems to be no, but maybe you should. If you are looking to promote your organization, and can benefit from ads or the metrics of your page, then a fan page may be the way to go.

Here is what Facebook has to say about this transition http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=18966 . I also found a great post about the new groups here http://www.allfacebook.com/new-facebook-groups-2010-10 . Here is what Facebook considers groups are for.

My take on all of this…If you are doing promotion, create a fan page, if you truly need a private group, you will have growing pains, but you will get past this. If anything is to be learned from this, it is that Facebook calls the shots on Facebook, and they have this control over your group, and fan pages for that mater. If anyone ever tells you that you don’t need a website and that a fan page is good enough, remember this.