In the beginning of this year, the biggest social network had unveiled Facebook At Work - a new feature that lets its users create a work account that is separated from their personal Facebook space. With this new feature, users are able to interact with their coworkers, while keeping their private lives to themselves.
Ten months forward and Facebook At Work finds its way to the Royal Bank of Scotland, which aims to have 30,000 of its employees on their Facebook At Work network by March 2016, and its entire workforce totaling 100,000 when 2016 ends.
The deal marks as a new phase for Facebook's enterprise version of the social network as it clearly shows the company's goals to scale this business-to-business (B2B) service. Facebook recently had a strong quarter, a total of 1.49 billion users monthly on desktop and 1.3 billion on mobile is no small feat. This indicates that enterprises are taking the biggest social network today quite seriously.
According to Julien Condorniou, Facebook's Director of Global Platform Partnerships in London, there are now about 300 businesses using Facebook At Work. These companies include several big-named ones such as Heineken.
Facebook is not charging a fee for businesses to use the enterprise version as of late; however, the company may plan to in the future. "We're still in beta but we do plan to monetize, based around a freemium business model," said Codorniou in an interview. "We are also building sales and marketing teams for Facebook at Work across the globe right now."
As the time progresses, Facebook At Work will see itself competing with different enterprise communication platforms including Slack, Yammer, Chatter at Safelsforce and Hipchat.
For people interested in signing up for a Facebook At Work account, their company must first be using Facebook At Work in order for it to work. And to clear the confusion, Facebook At Work is different from Business Manager because the former is a collaborative and communication tool, while Business Manager is designed to manage the user's ads and public spaces.
