Last week news broke out that Facebook will be launching an all-new social network for businesses. Sound familiar?
According to latest reports, the new social network will allow businesses to manage and improve interaction between employees and creating a more efficient work environment. So maybe it won’t be a duplicate of LinkedIn, but how will it differ to other ‘professional’ social media platforms?
Facebook At Work will be aimed at medium to large sized businesses that face challenges with managing their workforce. Unlike other platforms, it will focus attention on interactions happening internally instead of creating connections to professionals outside your company.
This platform will be completely separate from a user’s personal Facebook account, but users can be given the option to link their personal account to their work account. Facebook have confirmed that work accounts will only be visible to their companies which will be a reassurance to most businesses no doubt.
The best way for me to describe the platform is it looks like a cross between LinkedIn and a CRM (e.g. Highrise) – employees can share posts, documents with others in their company, and also plan meetings. Companies will likely need to pay to use the new platform as Facebook have confirmed that it will be ad-free.
There isn’t much info about Facebook at Work at the moment, so I’m not sure how it will come into play when it comes to managing employees. Facebook state that their new platform will make work days “efficient” but they haven’t specified which tools in the platform will help you do just that. So we will be waiting to find out more over the next few days after it’s been trialled out by Facebook’s focus group.
I’m sceptical about it, but we’ll see…
