“Productivity Killer” may be a harsh nickname for Facebook, but it is a pretty accurate term to describe the world’s largest social media world. A survey released back in June found that nearly 40 percent of employers pointed specifically to social media as the main productivity stopper in the workplace. When you consider that an estimated 1.3 billion people are active on Facebook every month, that’s quite a lot of productivity lost due to workers browsing their news feeds every so often—and a problem that many employers are frantically searching for a fix.
Facebook has a solution, and (not surprisingly) it is simple: more Facebook!
A secret, but now very public project called “Facebook at Work” is currently being developed that many are already calling a rival to social networking site LinkedIn. Essentially, Facebook would like to not only be an integral part of everyone’s online social life, but also integrate into their professional careers.
The idea of “Facebook at Work” is to make employees actually be more productive while on the clock by offering services such as online document collaboration and co-worker messaging, while of course, being a new hub for professional networking. Facebook’s new idea will basically allow workers to have a social profile along with a “work profile” while setting up the social media giant to go head-to-head with companies such as LinkedIn and Google (well, their Google Docs service anyway) in the future.
As mentioned before, there are many active users on Facebook, to the tune of 1.3 billion. To compare, LinkedIn has just a fraction of that, coming in at around 172 million active users every month. However, the number of current Facebook users that would eventually utilize “Facebook at Work” cannot be fully determined.
On the surface, “Facebook at Work” seems like a good idea, bringing together the networking aspect of professional life along with collaboration efforts to increase productivity in the workplace—or at least raise efficiency, as it could make it easier for employees to work together. This move could also help Facebook lure in younger users, as many teenagers are currently fleeing the site in favor of other social media networks.
