The social media giant wants to expand beyond personal usage. Facebook At Work will be the next step: offering chat, document sharing and networking in a professional setting.
It makes sense from FB's point of view: facebook is often blocked on the workplace so they are losing eyeballs on ads. But does it makes sense for businesses?
There is a flood of (semi-) social tools targeting the corporate world. LinkedIn of course although that's mostly used for networking and Google which offers shared documents, calendars and hangouts. There are also more dedicated business tools like Sharepoint, Salesforce, Slack etc and there is of course corporate powerhouse Microsoft which offers Lync (Skype for business) and Yammer.
The major advantage of Facebook is that the interface is already well-known: no training needed for the socializing parts. However document sharing and calendars are unknowns at the moment where Google and Microsoft have a huge advantage.
The most problematic issue will of course be the privacy/security aspect. Facebook is trying hard to change it's bad name, but it will take time to create the needed trust.
Can you imagine using Facebook At Work at your place? #SocMed
Nope
No – I only use FB for groups that exist only there (primarily car-related); I don't even communicate with individuals there outside of those groups. Everything else is here or just email lists. I would drop FB in a second if those groups moved elsewhere.
As far as from the business side, I don't see how they could use FB as so many pieces are missing. Unless you fear Google having access to your data despite SLAs, the distributed sharing and integration between GMail/Calendar/Docs/Drive/Hangouts/etc are hard to beat, and I don't see FB doing any of those. For example, at Square we use Google services extensively but we don't actually use G+ – so the only piece FB would really provide is the one piece we don't use.
Facebook
I think they should try, but ultimately its an overreach. I don't want to conduct business there and I do not see that changing.
However, I am very bullish on social business tools and was an early user of both Twitter DM's (2007) and Yammer (2009?) for that.
If I was picking something today, it would probably be Google Apps + Slack.
No, how does that work +Chris Lau Whose posts do you get to see?
And these top stories are not from your 'friends'?