You might have noticed that Facebook recently rolled out a totally new version of its “Groups” feature. Just like their predecessors, the new Groups are not ideal for small businesses looking to engage with customers.

Many small business owners relied on the old Groups to promote their products and services, but even then they were operating at a disadvantage.

There are some small ways you can use Groups to reach people, but Facebook’s Pages feature should be your primary engagement tool. That’s the way Facebook intended it, and here are a few practical reasons that Groups won’t cut it.

1. Groups Are Created By the Public, Not You

Groups are intended to emerge organically out of existing social relationships. People add their friends, colleagues or family members to groups like “Johnson Family,” “Class of ‘92,” or “Entrepreneurs.” As such, they’re only rarely created around a brand, and most Facebook users would write off any Group created under that pretense.

Facebook did this to make its social network better mirror the informal and largely unspoken social networks of the real world. It’s a departure from the old Groups system, which has now been deprecated.

Some of the old Groups still exist, but you can’t create Groups in the old style anymore — and it’s just as well, because those were never intended for brand promotion or customer engagement either, even though many business owners tried to use them that way.

2. You Have Limited Control Over Groups

Even if you’re the original creator of a Group, your options are limited. You can add people to the Group, but you can’t do anything besides post messages on its wall from an existing profile and add brief description text, sans outside links.

You can’t add more detailed information about your business, and you don’t have any customization options to show would-be customers or clients what you’re all about. Furthermore, you have to already be Facebook friends with someone to promote the Group to him or her.

Again, Groups are communal. They don’t offer any tools or special privileges to promoters or business owners.

3. There’s No Analytics Tool for Groups

You’ll need information about how your target audience is finding your promotional content, how much they’re engaging with it and which promotions work best or worst to reliably generate results with social media. Groups don’t offer any services to help you there.

Furthermore, few if any third-party applications for tracking engagement or managing social media presence offer analytics tools for Groups, in part because Facebook does not make much of the needed information public as it does with Pages, which we’ll discuss in a moment.

Without that data, you’ll be flying blind while you’re trying to reach your target.

Pages: The Best Choice for Facebook Engagement

Even though Groups won’t meet your needs, Facebook has something that will. Pages are designed specifically for brand promotion, with built-in analytics, customization options and advanced controls for presenting your case to customers and clients.

Users can “Like” a page to receive updates about it and place it on their profiles for all their friends to see. Their decision to Like the page is immediately broadcast to all their friends, though they can choose to remove that update after it’s been sent out.

That broadcast exposes you to their friends; consider it a sort of endorsement. It’s automated word of mouth. That doesn’t happen when a Facebook user is added to one of the new Groups.

You can upload videos, photos and applications, host discussions with online forums, and even host events in the Page’s name and account — all things you can’t do with Groups.

Facebook’s written an introductory guide to creating your Facebook Page, so check that out for more details.

[Image credit: Terry Ross]