'Facebook at Work' for business networking

Facebook is slowly and steadily covering more and more ground in the business networking domain. The social networking giant is planning to launch its enterprise social network (ESN) for businesses, named 'Facebook at Work'.

Similar to the popular social networking site in terms of look and feel, 'Facebook at Work' has profiles, news feed, groups and messages. The news feed shows latest facts and figures from the groups and channels an individual follows. The groups can either be open for all employees of an organisation or be accessible to specific teams.

Two different companies, if they are on the platform, can connect to each other seamlessly. Facebook would also allow usage of utility software such as Office365.

Over the last six months, Facebook at Work has been capturing the interest of CIOs across the world despite being in Beta. In fact, it is already being used by 450 companies and there are over 60,000 in the waiting list for what it calls the most democratised of enterprise solutions. The social media company expects ESN to be a major source of revenue in the future.

In India, companies like Godrej, YES Bank and L&T Infotech have already started using 'Facebook at Work'. The company plans to reach out to global working population of three billion. It is targeting a host of Indian start-ups, including Paytm, Zomato, Practo, Delhivery, AskMe and Urban Ladder to ramp up the numbers.

"India has turned out to be a very important market for us as the growth we have seen here is phenomenal. Start-ups as well as traditional companies have shown a lot of interest in the product," said JulienCodorniou, director, platform partnerships. "We've been adding a new company every day over the past few months, and India has seen the fastest adoption rates," he added.

Elaborating on the idea Codorniou added, “One of the biggest advantages is that CEOs can feel the pulse of the company on the timeline. It is all about creating a workplace where news travels fast,” he adds. If the timeline can’t give a good idea about the mood, there are analytics to give insights. Plus, for companies with operations across multiple countries, there is the added advantage that all posts are automatically translated to English.”

Among the biggest global clients on the platform are Royal Bank of Scotland and Telenor.

Facebook will now directly compete with Slack, HipChat, Yammer and a few others in this space. The company said the ESN would work on both mobile and desktop.