Nowadays many of us are on some type of social media platform, be it Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, or Facebook. At any given time you can log into any of these sites and you’re getting updates from friends, family and colleagues, with most activity being during the work day.  Bearing this in mind, it’s no surprise that Mark Zuckerberg has launched Facebook at Work.  But is this new addition to our daily digital distraction a good thing or a bad thing?

Facebook (as is any social media) is there for you to interact with people online; to be social.  But how does this translate to the workplace? I mean you already talk around the water cooler, or at someone’s desk or at the company potluck so is there really any difference?  The public pilot of the social media giant’s corporate social platform was launched late last week.

There is an app for iOS and eventually Android, but your company does have to adopt it. If your company uses Facebook at Work you will have a unique account that you can link to your personal Facebook profile, but the two are still separate.  In some aspects this idea is like the company intranet with a social aspect on a more relaxed scale.

On the business side though, how do you control from the corporate aspect what goes up on the Facebook at Work site? Confidential documents, user privacy and communication are all concerns. How is the information separated from your personal profile if you connect the two?  There is a lot to consider.

There are already sites and tools such as SalesForce Chatter and Asana that were attempting to foster the social aspect with corporate collaboration, while they both still exist, they never really caught on in the business world. Will Facebook really be a viable option for companies? Will it be secure? Will employees even want to use it?