Facebook At Work Launch Is Now Just Months Away

Facebook has revealed that its enterprise-focused social media network is set to launch within the next few months.

The company said that Facebook at Work will be coming out of testing soon, having been in a closed beta since January, and in development for nearly 18 months, as Facebook tries to get the product just right before release.

“I would say 95 percent of what we developed for Facebook is also adopted for Facebook at Work,” Julien Codorniou, director of global platform partnerships at Facebook, told Reuters.

The service will be open to all companies once launched and Facebook plans to charge “a few dollars per month per user” for premium services such as analytics and customer support, a company spokeswoman added.

Professional

Looking to gain market share away from the likes of LinkedIn and Yammer in the business space, Facebook at Work is a closed social network that will display profiles, news feeds and photos in an environment that will help with networking with colleagues and competitors at an enterprise level.

One major difference is that users will be encouraged to follow their co-workers rather than friend them, much like Twitter.

The platform looks almost identical to the actual Facebook, but there is a different colour scheme.

More than 100 companies are using Facebook at Work as part of the beta, including the likes of Heineken, which is planning to roll out the service to all its 550 US employees by the end of September, and RBS, which will make the service available to all 100,000 of its workers.

The launch will be the latest in a series of new releases from Facebook as it looks to keep ahead of competitors in the battle for the social media space.

The company revealed last month that August 24 had seen more than one billion people accessing Facebook for the first time over a single day, meaning one in seven people across the world logged into the social network.

This is despite recent reports claiming that many users were abandoning the site, whilst some critics said that teenagers think Facebook is no longer cool and are therefore jumping ship to rival social networks.

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