The following is a brief excerpt from the October 2010 edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible, the comprehensive guide to marketing your company, app, or brand on Facebook.

Groups is Facebook’s new lightweight web product that enables users to organize around a shared interest or community affiliation, and to easily connect and collaborate with others by using Facebook’s core communication features. It can be more than only a consumer product for clubs and associations. This excerpt from the Facebook Marketing Bible discusses how Facebook Groups can support business organization and productivity.

First, we’d like to run through a few caveats related to working with Groups. Facebook Groups does not include the security features and other options that many larger businesses demand. Additionally, some businesses do not want or permit their employees to use Facebook at the workplace.

How, then, does Groups function as a product for enterprise? The value of Facebook Groups to business productivity comes in the ways in which the product adds a social dimension to work collaboration and content sharing. While Groups is not the right product for every business, it can nonetheless be a useful part of how members of any organization — whether professional or personal — connect over work-related content.

As one example, Facebook Groups can be used to replace multiple other organization and communication systems such as email, shared calendars, wikis, and instant messaging. This helps reduce the amount of time spent switching between applications and checking for updates, leaving team members to focus on their work.

Sample Use Case: Create a Rich Media Discussion Board For Your Company Using the Group Feed

Groups can post text, photos, videos, and links to the Group feed using Facebook’s built-in publisher. Members of the Group can share and aggregate text content to review before a meeting, image content like graphs of statistics, or video content like a branded promotional spot.

One advantage that Groups offer over email has to do with rich content distribution. Members distributing rich content like images and links inside a company do not have to download attachments or open them in separate applications, and can instead review everything while still within Facebook.

More productivity use cases are available in the full Facebook Marketing Bible chapter on Groups. We have recently updated the October 2010 edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible to include detailed information on Groups, including how marketers can use the product to broaden the reach of their Facebook Page and increase engagement among fans. To learn if the Facebook Marketing Bible is right for your brand, please visit the Facebook Marketing Bible.