It’s a phenomenon that we all read about every once in a while: whenever a new market starts to show great potential, it’s only a matter of time before the big players turn up and join the party. A company like Apple that suddenly throws themselves into the phone market, a search tool like Google that decides to start developing its own web browser, or perhaps most recently, a social media platform like Facebook and Workplace who infiltrates the cloud-collaboration market.
Whenever such a thing happens, it generally causes a lot of confusion for the already-existing players in that one market. Out of our own experience, there are usually two types of businesses: those who identify a direct threat, opposed to those who identify an opportunity.
In our case, we weren’t necessarily celebrating the arrival of Facebook Workplace, however, yet we were somehow pretty relieved. In fact, the arrival of Facebook actually marked the overall importance of collaborative tools. As soon as the big boys got involved, there was not a single scratch of doubt left that collaborative tools were going to play an even greater role in the near future.
On the other end of the spectrum however, some people view Facebook’s arrival as ‘yet another tool’ on an already pretty extensive market. So what makes them different in the first place? There’s actually one major difference: just like Talkspirit, Facebook Workplace is one of the very few tools out there that offers a complete user experience, all in one single overview. A view in which the user enjoys both the communication as the collaboration aspects – just like we’re used to with popular social tools. It all boils down to the ability to both chat with others, whilst collaborating through groups. An all-in-one view accompanied by a personalised newsfeed.
In many ways, Facebook workplace is pretty similar to talkspirit. Yet, there are 5 crucial differences that highly affect the overall experience. This blog post will outline these 5 points, and further explain how Talkspirit is different.
1. A place for work
Facebook is already playing a big role in the personal lives of many – perhaps more than we truly wish for. Which brings us to the real question: do you really want it to consume your professional life as well? We believe it is of great importance to deliver a dedicated workspace presented in the company colours, that yet still feels familiar to tools we already use in our daily lives. Doing so draws a clear line between what’s personal and what’s work related – creating a better focus to really get things done. Talkspirit is doing just that.
2. Easy integrations
Integrating the apps you are already using means you only need to go one place to get all the critical information you need to smoothly run your business. Integrations are very powerful: it doesn’t only save a lot of time and keeps the general overview, but it also allows effective collaboration. That is to say that whenever a new activity arises, everyone is able to take action – even if some people do not have access to that particular app.
All in all, integrations make our lives easier, accelerate decision-making and facilitate a more transparent working environment. But the real true value here lies in ‘automation’; it’s simply too time-consuming to manually check and link what’s important. A big advantage of the Talkspirit platform is that it provides this deceive automation process. New activities of apps automatically appear in the newsfeed, where after the related group will service for collaboration purposes if needed.
Opposed to Facebook, Talkspirit actually provides a bunch of native apps. This means that you do not need to be a programming champion in order to set up your favourite apps – doing so actually just takes a few clicks. As a result, almost any app can be seamlessly integrated within Talkspirit without any real effort.
3. Rich collaboration functionality
With more than 10 years of experience in the cloud-collaboration market, we’ve learned a thing or two. One of which is that in terms of genuine collaboration, a simple post and/or event doesn’t always cut it. This is one of the reasons why Talkspirit is unique in its own way, as it comes with a suite of additional collaboration features.
– Checklists: move towards that finish line together. Sums up perfectly what still has to be done and keeps a nice overview along the way.
– Labels: as the word already indicates; it allows you to label certain activities to keep a better overview and create personal workflows.
4. Forever in control
If you have ever used Facebook Workplace, you might have noticed that they’re making use of a keen algorithm that determines what does and what doesn’t show up on your newsfeed – frankly, there’s no way around that. Some people perceive this as a real problem, as you never truly know ‘why’ something is appearing in front of you – regardless of the fact if you even want to be there in the first place or not.
At Talkspirit we believe in full transparency, accountability & control, meaning that every user has the power to decide for themselves what they deem important. Every user’s newsfeed is truly personalized, only displaying information that fully makes sense to them.
5. Privacy & Security
On a final note, it’s perhaps interesting to know that Talkspirit is a French solution – engineered, maintained and secured in the heart of France. Just like any other cloud-based software enterprise, we understand the importance of safeguarding your data at all cost, which is why we take security, availability but also privacy very serious.
All stored data is considered to be the exclusive property of your organization. Neither Talkspirit nor any other third party may or can even so much as lift a finger towards stored company data. These rules logically also apply for Facebook Workplace, however, it is important to be aware of the fact that this is an exclusive right for premium users only. In case you’ll ever find yourself using the free version of Workplace, do keep in mind that Facebook will be the data controller.
