Is anyone using Facebook at Work?

 Facebook didn’t leave many stones unturned at its annual F8 developer conference last month, but Facebook at Work, its enterprise social network, was one notable exception. In fact, the company didn’t mention Facebook at Work at all during the two-day event. We reached out for a quick status update, and here’s what we learned. 

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Facebook at Work has been available as a limited pilot for about three months. The associated mobile app is available in a few public U.S. app stores, including iTunes and Google Play, but you can log in only if your employers are program participants. Pilots are underway in other countries, so the Facebook at Work app is also available in international app stores. However, little has changed since it got off the ground at the beginning of the year.

Only a “handful” of companies are using Facebook at Work, according to Elisabeth Diana, corporate communications director at Facebook.

“We’re hoping to expand the pilot and be able to talk about it more soon,” Diana says. “We’re looking at companies that span different time zones, that have a lot of departments where information sharing is actually an issue and you need something that helps make information sharing more efficient.”

Facebook at Work is all business

Facebook invited the first companies to participate in the program, and it has received inquiries from others ever since the beta launched, according to Diana. Despite that interest, Facebook isn’t ready for full demonstrations because it’s still modifying the platform based on early feedback. Diana says the product’s evolution mirrors the way Facebook first introduced dedicated pages for businesses, and the general experience is similar to the experience on personal pages.

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News Feeds, Groups, and messages are all part of Facebook at Work, but there’s one major difference: All of information on the pages is corporate and not personal. Instead of being Friends with other users in Facebook at Work, businesspeople follow each other, and their News Feeds are based on interactions with those users.

“It’s all just information within a company and none of the information that you share with that company gets shared with your personal [page],” Diana says.

The lack of attention to Facebook at Work at F8 doesn’t mean much, according to Diana, because the product is still in infancy, and the company simply isn’t ready to share additional details.