I have been trying "Facebook at Work" at work. As we already had a Facebook group for the company it made sense.
This is not a tool to compete with LinkedIn. It is a tool that competes with e-mail/mail lists.
Somethings now make much more sense. From a security point of view, in a company over one thousand employees, it is easier to add or remove employees as they are hired or they left the company.
Also it is easier to share work content for a limited audience while using your private Facebook account in a more casual way.
The main problem is that people doesn't have so much interest in checking what's in there. We have already other communication methods like the old good mail. So "Facebook at Work" is just another one to add to the list.
If you add it to your phone - I have done that - you will get notifications as the usual app. One of the problems is that you also will get them on weekends or when on vacations. That is not ideal.
As any social tool it requires a lot of fine tuning and also to match the culture and preferences of the company.
Probably it is a good move for Facebook taking into account cost/benefit, but it is never easy with social tools as Facebook competitors have seen in the past.
Another tool which competes with emails is Atlassian Confluence, and they've nailed the "social networky" part. When discussing the idea of becoming a newsfeed-based social network for work with PMs there, they reject it: They're an intranet, you do your work there, attach documents, write reports, people get notified, they know your status, you check out their profiles, it all sounds like a social network BUT you actually do your job inside of it. I believe, that's the right way to make an social network sticky.
We use Confluence, but mostly for semi-static content like documentation, contact information for teams, etc.
The Confluence blogs are nice but they also have the problem of how much people reads them.
Facebook is used in a more casual way. So you can post about the game club, or a company party or even re-share cat pictures. Something that usually matters only for a short time spawn or is just social in nature.
I guess it depends on how sensitive they are. I'd warrant that 99% of communications aren't sensitive enough to bear in mind whatever risk you're implying. And really 'sensitive' communications probably shouldn't even take place by email, but face-to-face.
But the idea is to share the same kind of things that we shared in the Facebook group. We post about trainings, company social events, game clubs, meet ups, etc. Nothing is super-secret.
As code repository, for example, we use an on-premisses GitHub Enterprise.
In our company, communication is already highly splintered. We have so many ways of communicating, posting, sharing and chatting that nobody knows what is going on. It is also very distracting and time consuming. It is nearly impossible to do a conference over chat protocols now. Everyone wants to use "their own thing". It has become far worse than a TED talk I saw on meetings.
This is not a tool to compete with LinkedIn. It is a tool that competes with e-mail/mail lists.
Somethings now make much more sense. From a security point of view, in a company over one thousand employees, it is easier to add or remove employees as they are hired or they left the company. Also it is easier to share work content for a limited audience while using your private Facebook account in a more casual way.
The main problem is that people doesn't have so much interest in checking what's in there. We have already other communication methods like the old good mail. So "Facebook at Work" is just another one to add to the list.
If you add it to your phone - I have done that - you will get notifications as the usual app. One of the problems is that you also will get them on weekends or when on vacations. That is not ideal.
As any social tool it requires a lot of fine tuning and also to match the culture and preferences of the company. Probably it is a good move for Facebook taking into account cost/benefit, but it is never easy with social tools as Facebook competitors have seen in the past.