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The ever-growing, ever-changing Facebook gave us a new kind of page in its most recent reshuffling. Named Community Pages, these pages are “built around topics, causes or experiences” – a description that might produce as much confusion as enlightenment.

What’s the Difference Between Community Pages and Facebook’s Existing Official Pages?

The major difference is in the notion of community and the application to social media marketing. For conventional pages (individual, business or groups), the news and update streams on a Facebook wall are self-oriented. Most of the items relate to the owner.

In the case of community pages, the orientation of the news stream is different. Page maintainers are “authorized representatives of a business, brand, celebrity of organization”, so the kernel of the community remains determined by the establisher of the page. Further, page maintainers may still create and share content about the entities they represent.

The biggest differences between Groups and Community Pages is that there is no single maintainer – and that news items in Community Pages will not appear in your personal news feed. So where Groups allow you to communicate with other individuals about a particular subject, Community Pages allow you to learn and participate in knowledge sharing network.

Why Did Facebook Create Community Pages?

One idea is that this reduces the amount of patrolling pages Facebook needs to do when called upon to act by a brand manager or company who did not establish a page in question. This is a common problem on FB, and the admins have seen an interesting way around it by essentially saying: nobody owns this page, the community owns it. So when a brand manager for whatever reason arrives late to his or her own community, he or she has no problem influencing the community’s content on par with anybody else.

When you "Create a Page" on Facebook, you now have three options including the new "Community Page"