Facebook and Linkedin within hours of each other announced plans to launch apps and services geared towards internal employee communications.
While Facebook has struggled to convince its users to treat the platform as a business networking resource, LinkedIn has focused almost exclusively on its services as a way to connect outside of the agency. While you would expect LinkedIn to have a leg up (if, in fact, either of these services are successful), you wouldn’t want to count out the social network with over 1.1B users.
It’s an appropriate moment in time for both of these services to launch; the workforce continues to decentralize, flexibility in hours and vacations increase, and Flickr cofounder Stuart Butterfield’s internal communications tool Slack has garnered praise and quick adoption.
But what can we expect from these tools?
LinkedIn’s plans, according to Re/code, seemingly center on LinkedIn InMail, an e-mail service, and the ability to share content within certain groups. The obvious drawback – at least upon first glance – is that every employee may not be on LinkedIn, so it’s certainly not a complete replacement for existing internal tools that a company might use.
Following Facebook’s mobile strategy, Facebook @ Work will be available as a stand-alone IOS and Android app as well as the web. It will mimic the look and feel of the regular Facebook experience, offering many of the same features. The only difference will be that only people within one’s company can access the content. While Facebook is more likely – though not guaranteed – to have all of a company’s employees on the service, some may still struggle to associate the social networking giant with work-time activities beyond furtively checking on friends’ lives while at your desk.
Both services are ones to watch, but neither at first blush looks like it will slow down the rapid ascent of Slack and other tools built specifically from the ground up for business use.
