Facebook is working on a new offering called Facebook at Work, according to the Financial Times.
It’s known that Facebook employees have used the site internally for some time. By offering an internal social network for businesses, along with collaborative tools to work on shared documents, Facebook could shortly compete with a number of new tools across a variety of technologies (only a partial list):
- Shared docs
- Google docs
- Microsoft Office 365
- Internal social networks
- Microsoft Yammer
- Salesforce Chatter
- IBM Connections
- Business social networking*
*If more people used Facebook for business social networking, those accounts would have more business-related content and profile information, which could eventually threaten Linkedin. For the first time, Facebook could be relevant to the B2B advertiser–often willing to pay a premium for its ads to reach the right buyer.
Any inroads Facebook makes in any of these areas would serve to make Facebook identity more valuable (more about Social Identity and why this is valuable in this report). The better its Social Identity data, the more valuable its ads. This is even more important to Facebook now that its relaunch of Atlas aims to replace cookies with Facebook ID.
On side note: I’ve heard/seen from a few former Facebook folks that they engage more with friends outside of Facebook after leaving; it’s interesting to think about how behaviors and interactions might change for people using Facebook at Work.