CHECKING FACEBOOK WHILE you’re at work could be justified as the company is working on a new website designed with professionals in mind.
Titled ‘Facebook at Work’, the site will allow its 1.35 billion monthly active users to chat with colleagues, connect with professional contacts and share and edit documents similar to Google Drive and Microsoft Office, according to the Financial Times.
The site will look similar to the main Facebook site, with a newsfeed and groups, but users will be able to keep their personal profile separate to their work identity.
It’s expected that the service will be free, at least initially, to encourage people to use the site and boost the amount of time spent on the platform.
The site would put it in direct competition with the likes of LinkedIn, Microsoft and Google, the latter launching Google For Work earlier this year. Facebook employees have used its site in their daily work and the idea to expand it to other companies had been discussed internally for a while.
LinkedIn, which has been the main social media site for professionals, has grown as it prioritised networking and news and analysis pieces aimed towards specific industries as a way to get users to return regularly.
On top of having Office, Microsoft has a similar product called Yammer, a corporate social network it acquired back in 2012 for $1.2 billion (€958 million).
One potential obstacle would be convincing those businesses which have banned the service from work to use it again. A free service could convince them to reverse their decision although employees may be worried that it could result in employees checking the main site regularly instead of working.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say