Commentary
LikedIn: Facebook Plans Business Network
- by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, November 17, 2014
Social media’s
role in helping office drones goof off is legendary, but “using Facebook at work” may soon take on a new meaning. No longer content with dominating every aspect of its users’
personal lives, Facebook is said to be planning a new service -- “Facebook at Work" -- that will bring it into the business social networking arena, according to the Financial Times.
The FT writes that Facebook at Work will have many of the same features as Facebook at the Rest of Your Life, including newsfeeds and groups. However users’ work profiles will be separate from their personal profiles, thus minimizing the risk that you will inadvertently share, say, off-color jokes or photos of your prized bong collection with your boss or clients. Obviously, this would put Facebook in competition with LinkedIn, which pioneered the whole separate-work-profile-without-bongs thing.
The Facebook at Work extension could also function as an enterprise social network for internal communications, with features for chatting with co-workers, collaboration on documents, and so on -- again rather like existing services offered by Google Drive, Slack, Salesforce’s Chatter, and Microsoft’s Outlook and Yammer.
The news comes as Facebook’s phenomenal growth rate of the last decade appears to be moderating somewhat, prompting the company to find new ways to engage existing users. So far this year, Facebook has added 122 million new users, growing from 1.228 billion at the end of the fourth quarter of 2013 to 1.35 billion at the end of the third quarter of 2014. By comparison over the same period from 2012-2013 the company added 133 million users, and from 2011-2012, 207 million users.
Plenty of people are already using Facebook at work, just not necessarily for work. Last year a survey by SilkRoad Technologies found that 75% of office workers say they access social media from work via mobile devices at least once a day, with 60% accessing it several times a day. In another survey from Intelligent Office, 30% of respondents admitted to spending at least an hour a day on social media while at work.
Erik Sass is editor of Publishers Daily. You can reach Erik at eriksass@gmail.com.
This is inevitable... LinkedIn can't have the entire market for business social media and has been trending down in usage lately. Too many ads and email/spam. Too much noise and not enough interaction between it's users. I hope FB does a good job with this.
I am not going to lie, I did laugh when I read this at first. Facebook is doing anything they can to stay alive because with all the other new social media sites, many are turning to those instead. It is ironic too because our computer programmer at my work was telling me that he blocked some sites at a company where it will only open during breaks. After having this installed for a few months, invoices were being delivered two days sooner. This shows that Facebook was a distraction at this work of place.
But this idea is nothing new, there is LinkedIn where people can already talk with others at work professionally and there is a newsfeed with business updates you want to see. If Facebook were to create a similar site like LinkedIn, I would not subscribe. I am not interested in having two of the same similar sites, it is more work for me and a waste of time when LinkedIn is already very popular and I have already had everything set up.
Besides LinkedIn there are already other sites like Google Drive which is quick and easy to use to share documents. Also with that same account there are GoogleDocs already using Microsoft programs, which is pretty much universal on all computers.
In the end, if all goes well, it would be nice to have many functions under one sign in and site. To be able to use the regular Facebook functions with interacting with friends and posting, while being able to have a professional profile, and being able to transfer documents.