Let’s face it, social media is everywhere and here to stay. Our devices are constantly alerting us of the latest posts, tweets, shares, and whatever other notification is out there. For those who can afford the distractibility social media presents, there’s really no issue with the constant stream of information flooding in through our phones.
Even though there is a time and place for everything, the compulsive checking of social media can become problematic for people — especially in professional work environments. As our workforce grows younger, using online networking sites are a no-brainer for things like marketing, outreach, and establishing brands and events. Realizing this, social media giant, Facebook is making the leap from keeping in touch with friends and family to connecting coworkers on the clock.
Encouraging Use of Facebook at Work
With their newest rollout, Facebook at Work the social site is looking to enter the realm of collaborative software and workplace communication. Really, this is nothing new with many products like Axosoft, Slack, or Asana keeping companies on track and allowing company-wide transparency and teamwork.
Essentially, using familiar features like newsfeeds, events, posts, and messaging, employees can use the format of Facebook to actually collaborate and work with one another.
What may come to be Facebook’s strongest selling point is the fact that they may barely have to sell their newest product — more than one billion people actively use the social network already.
Despite this, Facebook at Work has only been rolled out to a select number of companies including Heineken, The Royal Bank of Scotland, and Hootsuite to name a few. Employees are given separate accounts from their personal Facebook profiles, allowing them to participate and collectively post to the company page. Everything on Facebook at Work is kept confidential from the public view and the company retains the rights to whatever gets posted. Nothing from your personal account shows up in your Facebook at Work account and vice versa, so it’s meant to be strictly business.
Now, instead of employees having to resist the urge to leap on Facebook at any given moment (mobile or not), Facebook at Work can provide a familiar, workplace-friendly platform to improve productivity and centralize company communications in a new way. Coupled with a mobile version, Facebook’s newest incarnation might prove to be a smart blend between professionalism and a leisurely interface.
Rolling Out Beyond The U.S.
To really seal the deal, Facebook at Work isn’t skimping on the security features either. The platform currently follows third-party industry standards set forth by the Cloud Security Alliance. The full white paper on security can be found here.
What makes this a unique product for Facebook is that it was first rolled out almost entirely abroad. Companies like Telenor in Norway who operate wireless carriers in places like India, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and Pakistan were some of the first to come aboard. As a competing platform to Slack, another popular collaborative software, the strategy at Facebook seems to focus on overtaking the Asian and Eastern markets before anyone else. Considering that Facebook is already one of the most globally recognizable sites and used widely among many countries, it’s possible that Facebook at Work may do just that.
For now, we’ll have to continue listening down the grapevine to see how the first adopters of Facebook at Work value their newest corporate tool until it becomes widely available.
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