05 Feb 2016 / by We@Webaartz / in Facebook, FB@Work, Social Media

Facebook At Work: A Social Network for Businesses

Is it difficult for you to collaborate with co-workers in the office? Are you facing problems in interacting and sharing updates with multiple people at the same time? Or, does your mailbox get bombarded with emails? Well, Facebook is here to solve all your work collaboration issues! It has launched a new version under the label “FB@Work” tailored exclusively for use by businesses to help them improve the communication system and boost overall productivity.

What is FB@Work? How can it be useful for my business?

The key idea behind FB@Work is— more connected workplace is a more productive workplace.

This new Facebook version meant for workplace will replicate the several features of the popular social version, offering co-workers and employees a variety of ways to collaborate, communicate, schedule meetings, make announcements, share files and much more!

The Facebook work account will be different than the Facebook personal account; employees can use their work accounts with separate logins or can simply link the work and personal account for accessing everything from one place on desktops.

FB@Work has a News Feed of “what’s new and relevant to your company”, groups, individual and group chat; you can also send invitation of new events to your whole company at once. With FB@Work, anyone will be able to see the public content you share, while private content remains secret to the co-workers only.

With all the hype, will FB@Work actually work?

The growing globalization of businesses and their dependencies on flexible and remote ways of working together gives rise to the need of allowing workers to be significantly connected in order to drive business growth and success. Thus, “Facebook At Work” is being appreciated by most businesses, especially those eager to experience the most effective use of technology in the office and undergo higher employee engagement with enhanced connectivity levels. For the people used to managing their private lives through technology and social media, the arrival looks to be long overdue.

The introduction of FB@Work will help in reducing the use of the internal email systems. This, in turn, can assist businesses manage IT capacity and ease the employees from the need of monitoring unnecessary email traffic. The flexibility of sharing files and data with multiple users and devices, and synchronizing the shared files to maintain the file reliability is an indispensable tool for many managers.

Is it free for my business? What is the future scope?

Initially, Facebook will be focusing on businesses with 100 or more employees at the workplace. Facebook hasn’t yet exposed any pricing or plans to monetize the product. Facebook has shared its plans of integrating the service together with helpful productivity tools and other business software but is yet to disclose the complete details.

The inescapable growth of technology at the workplace and its clear benefits, we can look forward to seeing platforms such as FB@Work turning into an essential part of the workplace toolkit.

What are the risks?

The businesses that can harness the advantages of collaboration tools like FB@Work and evade the possible risk of mixing work and pleasure shall see better interaction among the colleagues across their global offices and thus experience increase in overall productivity.

This product puts Facebook neck-to-neck with the other acclaimed collaboration tools like Microsoft’s Yammer, Convo, Slack and Socialcast that are trying to ease the “business social network” space.

Employers would want to make sure that the system is employed for business-related uses only and would consider some things like—

The need for protecting confidential information and data Sharing data securely and safely, especially where businesses work globally Avoiding discrimination and defamatory or inappropriate comments.

Where must I signup my Business?

“Facebook at Work” is officially available for Android and iOS along with a Facebook version of Facebook at Work accessible through its official website. This would allow the businesses to Sign-Up their company and create their own social networks with the new benefits of the Facebook ecosystem.

What’s your opinion on FB@Work? Do you think FB@Work will work? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comment section below.