‘Facebook at Work’ Allows Employers to Create Their Own Social Networks

Corporations usually discourage employees from using their Facebook accounts at work. Arguably, it is rightly considered to be in bad taste to engage oneself elsewhere during work hours. Thus, it’s not surprising that many employers block its access within workplace as a result. Facebook aims to change this trend with the launch of a fresh variant of its service that is purely meant for access within companies. It has quite neatly termed it ‘Facebook at Work”.

Facebook at Work has been in the works for the past few months. What has finally transpired with yesterday’s release is an app called Work for iOS as well as Android, and another version termed ‘Facebook at Work’ on the Facebook website. At the time of writing, these have been exclusively offered to employees of ‘pilot partners’ for testing purposes.

This new service offers organisations the opportunity to tailor Facebook according to their own needs.

This new service offers organisations the opportunity to tailor Facebook according to their own needs. It gives employers control over the way they want employees to engage in social networking strictly within the organisation.
It’s still along the same lines as Facebook with features such as messages, groups, events and news feed. This implies that each employee’s information would be inaccessible to anyone not belonging to the organisation. Employees are free to keep separate Work accounts or link them with other work profiles.

This is clearly Facebook’s attempt at taking on tools of communication currently available for use at work. These include: Slack, Yammer, Socialcast and Convo. Interestingly, LinkedIn only recently revealed that it was planning something along similar lines for the sake of social networking among coworkers. It surely looks as if the competition is starting to build up in this regard.

‘Facebook at Work’ is going to go up directly against the likes of Yammer, Slack and possibly LinkedIn which is planning a similar service

What’s also interesting to note is that Director of Engineering at Facebook, Lars Rasmussen is also the executive in charge of Facebook at Work. Now this is the man who joined Facebook in 2010 upon leaving Google where he was a crucial part of the team that brought us the Google Maps service. He admits that he sees this as an opportunity to effectively pursue a once-failed project like Google Wave. He would certainly hope this materializes as it could pave another way of revenue for Facebook if rightly executed.