Facebook has set into motion a pilot program ; ‘Facebook at work’ aimed at enterprise collaboration which will be rolled out in a few months. Facebook intends to take on Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn in an effort to be a more integral part of your workday. This will include work-friendly chat, document collaboration and storage. Facebook at Work will look like Facebook with news feeds, but offer work and personal pages.
The new enterprise collaboration tool will look a lot like your personal Facebook page with a News Feed, Messenger and Groups, but it would be completely separate from your personal Facebook, so there would be no danger whatsoever that the two would ever bleed into one another. That means, no work content would ever appear in your personal feed and no personal content would ever appear in your work feed, a level of privacy that would be absolutely essential for all parties to trust it.
Some Corporate organizations tend to disable social features as it is assumed to cause distractions in the workplace.
Multiple companies have been trying to reinvent collaboration, workflow and inboxes. Google recently introduced inbox, an app designed to cure email overload. Salesforce has had Chatter, a Facebook clone, for years. LinkedIn is a play at work. And Microsoft, Google and a host of others also offer what Facebook at Work will.
From recent research, the following conclusions were made:
- Facebook needs to be a more integral part of the workday to keep engagement levels high.
- That work engagement will be critical since Facebook could be losing younger users over time.
- The corporate market could be lucrative for Facebook—if only because a work friendly version would convince enterprises to unblock it.
- Facebook already has a ton of personal data and connecting work personas could encroach on LinkedIn’s business, court HR execs and improve ad rates.
We can’t wait to have this rolled out.
