Sharing dank memes and chatting with your mates on Facebook is one thing, but Facebook is about to move into world of business. The new enterprise-focused tool will be a mobile and desktop app service, and is designed to help co-workers collaborate, stay in touch and share content, much like they do already, but in a more focused and business-like network.
While the service has been in testing since 2015, it looks like the service will officially launch on October 10th with Facebook planning a launch event for the service in London.
“I’ve always said that Facebook has to diversify and this is one of their efforts to penetrate the enterprise,” said Brian Blau, a Gartner analyst. “The enterprise has been interested in social tools in as much as they can help with explicit work issues, such as communications and project facilitation, but so far the adoption of pure-play social communications in the enterprise hasn’t yet reached maturity.”
While we don’t know what this new service will look like, we do expect it to be a separate entity to the current Facebook, most likely to avoid cross-posting private business dealings with the more public service.
“One common mistake that consumer-facing companies make is thinking the step to the enterprise market is both easy and lucrative,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst with The Enderle Group. “Collaborative products can represent more risk for IT than they do benefit… [Enterprises] typically view social networks as time sucks and are appalled at how much productivity has dropped because of social networks and other worker distractions.”
It will be interesting to see how Facebook at Work takes off, do you think many businesses will use it?
