Facebook Preparing The Launch of ‘Facebook At Work’

Facebook at Work, which has been specifically designed to help facilitate better communication between work colleagues, will soon be released to the public, Julien Codorniou, head of Facebook at Work, told Re/code.

The service has been in a closed beta since January, and has been in development for nearly 18 months, as Facebook tries to get the product just right before a possible release sometime later this year.

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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.

Codorniou would not reveal how the service will be marketed, but did say that businesses will start with the free version and pay for extra features or analytics associated with their accounts.

More than 100 companies are using Facebook at Work as part of the beta, which is still growing, said Codorniou, 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 Linio, a Latin American e-commerce company, which will have 2,000 employees signed up by the end of the month.

Staying ahead

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.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed earlier this week that the site was finally closing in on introducing a ‘Dislike’ button, although the option would mainly allow users to express empathy or sympathy with posts.

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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