Facebook hits one billion users in a day - so why has its Facebook at Work enterprise tool been a failure?

Facebook has failed to use its power to make a significant dent in the enterprise collaboration space

Mark Zuckerberg is shouting from the rooftops because Facebook, for the first time in its 11-year history, has reached a billion users in one day.

"On Monday, one in seven people on Earth used Facebook to connect with their friends and family," Facebook founder and CEO Zuckerberg wrote in a statement, a feat he described as "just the beginning of connecting the whole world".

"Our community stands for giving every person a voice, for promoting understanding and for including everyone in the opportunities of our modern world," he continued.

"A more open and connected world is a better world. It brings stronger relationships with those you love, a stronger economy with more opportunities, and a stronger society that reflects all of our values," he added.

One billion users in a day is an impressive achievement for the social network, but the question has to be asked: given Facebook's clout in the web communication and sharing space, why has it failed so badly to make in-roads into businesses as an enterprise collaboration tool?

Facebook does have its own enterprise collaboration service called Facebook at Work. The service launched in January and allows users to create a Facebook account just for work and use it to interact with other users of the service within their organisation.

But despite Facebook's vast consumer userbase, demand for Facebook at Work does not come close to competing with the likes of Microsoft's Skype and Yammer services, Google's Hangouts and For Work platform or even the smaller collaboration software providers in the space.

Robin Collyer, marketing and "decisioning" specialist at Pegasystems, argues that it comes down to the fact that users see Facebook as a purely social tool that they don't want to have overlap with their working life.

"Whilst collaboration might be 'what' Facebook is for, the reason users adopt it, the 'why', is for their lives outside of work. Do they really want to mix the two?," he said.

According to Tristan Rogers, CEO of digital workplace provider Concrete, it's because Facebook started as a means of socially sharing personal updates rather than with any pretensions to being an enterprise sharing platform that it has struggled to move away from being viewed as a time-wasting tool.

"As a social network, Facebook is built on the principle that people 'want' to share information with each other," said Rogers.

"It is a voluntary network with no predetermined goals or outcomes. Users can do what they want on Facebook with whomever they wish. That is not very enterprise," he explained.

"An enterprise is built on pre-defined rules about outcomes, quantities, margins and repeatability. Workers are given roles and responsibilities, and the ability to perform these well can drive their personal success," he continued, describing something Facebook very much isn't.

Rogers likened the potential future of Facebook at Work to Yammer, the enterprise social network Microsoft purchased for $1.2bn because it already had over 100 million users.

However, despite the cheap $10 cost per customer, Rogers described the Yammer acquisition as flawed "because a user account is not worth anything unless the user that it belongs to is using it and is deriving value from it".

And while it's debatable whether Yammer was indeed worth the investment (though one or two businesses may disagree) it's arguable that users of Facebook also may not be deriving much value when posting or viewing photos of their food or cat.

"This is the billion dollar issue with enterprise software: it has to drive value," continued Rogers.

"And this is particularly true of SaaS vendors whose service mantra is judged by the ongoing value it generates. No value? Switch it off."

That's what often happens to Yammer. And that is what could happen to Facebook at Work "unless [Facebook] can work out what the value proposition is for the enterprise", he said.

Facebook at Work also faces another problem and it's a problem well known to any IT professional; that if there's a "shadow" IT tool that is easier to use than an enterprise one, they'll use it. Why sign up for Facebook for Work if all your colleagues are collaborating using free, easy-to-access Google tools?

"The challenge with so many work collaboration tools is that they end up accelerating inefficient ways of working. It's not surprising that we all end up trying a plethora of 'free' tools in the quest to win back time in our days," said Collyer.

Henn Ruukel, CEO of messenger service Fleep and former director of site operations at Skype, told Computing that his experiences at Skype make him "sceptical" of Facebook's ability to become an enterprise tool.

"We made several attempts to build Skype for Business alongside the consumer-focused offering and eventually always failed due to lack of focus and resources," he said.

"I'm happy to see Facebook proving i'm wrong and I would welcome good competition from them in the business messaging market," Ruukel added.