Facebook

Facebook at Work just launched and, as a Business Insider article notes, its biggest hurdle to overcome branding as an enterprise product may be its own reputation. When you think of Facebook, your first thoughts may be of cat videos and ads, or you may be averse to the site because of concerns over your personal privacy. Employers have often frowned upon its use in the workplace as a signal of employees not focused on the work to be done. So why would you want it for your business and what is it?

As an enterprise collaboration tool with a monthly per-user fee (eventually), here’s what Facebook at Work might do for your business:

  1. While employers and executives may push back on having Facebook accounts, their Facebook at Work accounts would be separate from personal accounts.
  2. Those familiar with Facebook will be immediately familiar with Facebook at Work. It works similarly while being a separate, private enterprise tool. A user’s feed would be a Work Feed, instead of a News Feed, and would include anything from notes from other coworkers to project updates.
  3. Why would you want to use Facebook at Work? There are already many products in the marketplace similar to this such as Salesforce (one of our technology partners), and also Slack, Yammer, Insightly and others. Facebook at Work’s strength is familiarity.
  4. Facebook at Work takes the same tools used in its Facebook world and provides them for a work environment. Create Facebook Groups for project teams; set up events such as a product demo and invite people through their Facebook at Work accounts; use polls to easily ask questions across the company; provide mobile user access through the mobile apps.
  5. Hate the ads strewn across the Facebook site or app? Don’t worry: no ads in Facebook at Work. It’s strictly for work.
  6. Work with international team members? Facebook at Work’s auto-translate capabilities may lend a hand there!
  7. The built-in analytics are excellent. Admins can easily see which posts are viewed by the most people or who the truly influential users are. That may be interesting to challenge your CEO to try and be one of the top influential users!

The big downside? It’s rumored that Facebook at Work has a wait-list of more than 60,000 companies!