Business lessons from 10 years of Facebook

Richard Acreman looks at what the workplace can learn from the social media platform

In the past 10 years Facebook has expanded its membership to 1.25bn users worldwide, make profits of $1.5bn (£0.9bn) a year, and floated on the Nasdaq for $100bn. It must be doing something right.

There are aspects of Facebook's product that businesses can look to replicate in the workplace.

One of the key reasons behind Facebook's popularity with consumers is the high level of investment - and critical analysis - in its user interface, creating an engaging, positive journey for the user from start to finish and allowing navigation between activities to be simple, intuitive and enjoyable.

Unfortunately, the phrase "positive journey" does not describe the user experience of many internal company systems. These tend to be designed for usability and functionality, yet often fall flat on both counts.

Simple tools such as Instant Messenger, to supplement emails, or a central news feed that allows employees to flag relevant developments to their whole team at the click of a button can go a long way towards improving functionality and user experience simultaneously.

Internal business systems should be designed to increase employee engagement and productivity, but the biggest challenge facing new systems tends to be adoption: the very problem Facebook has been so adept at solving.

There are great rewards available to companies that understand how to follow the examples set by popular consumer websites - such as Facebook, Twitter and BuzzFeed - and use these to encourage the adoption of and integration with the systems that are central to their own business models.

Richard Acreman is chief executive of WM360