Facebook is diligently looking for big customers for its business platform, Workplace. Until now, the search was not as good as that of competitors such as Microsoft Teams and Slack, but today the social network of CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recruited a large new customer: Nestlé.
Nestlé is the world’s largest food and beverage brand and is now a customer of the Workplace platform. The deal covers hundreds of thousands of employees. Nestlé has transferred 210,000 of its employees to the platform over the past few months and plans to add thousands more in 2019.
Large new customers
Facebook is lyrical in the announcement of the collaboration with Nestlé. The impact was immediately noticeable, with 25 times more engagement per post and high percentages of mobile adoption, says Catherine Flynn, global marketing director at Workplace on Facebook. Managers use Live video to instantly connect with employees in different locations, while sales teams use Workplace to monitor and share information and what works well on a daily basis.
The Live video streaming tool is one of the many features that Facebook has copied from its social network to Workplace. The features are also the main ways for the company to differentiate itself from more popular alternatives like Slack. At the same time, Facebook states that the learning curve required to get the most out of Workplace is lower than that of the competition; after all, people already know most of the functions via the social network. It has to be: large companies that make the switch find it difficult to get large numbers of employees to use a new platform.
In any case, recruiting Nestlé is a big boost for Facebook. In November 2017 – the most recent time that Facebook published figures – Workplace had 30,000 customers. That’s much less than the competition. Last May it appeared that Slack had more than 500,000 and Microsoft Teams had 329,000 in September.
Nestlé is not the only large company that has chosen Workplace: Walmart, Dominos Pizza, Booking.com and Spotify also did so.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.