From the archive. First published in December 2015. Rewritten for clarity, with a note on what happened afterwards.
Facebook at Work launched as a business version of the network, with profiles, groups, events and pages, aimed squarely at the territory LinkedIn and later Slack occupied. It was eventually renamed Workplace.
How it turned out
Meta announced it was winding Workplace down, directing customers elsewhere and ending it as a product line. The internal communications market went to tools built specifically for it rather than to a repurposed social network.
LinkedIn, the competitor it was aimed at, is now considerably larger than it was then: nearly 1.3 billion members as of October 2025, with the business passing five billion dollars in quarterly revenue for the first time.
The pattern for audience builders
Meta has repeatedly built products adjacent to its core and closed them: Workplace, Instant Articles, Professional Services, Watch originals, the Explore Feed. The core feed survives everything.
What this means practically is that the durable part of Facebook is the feed and the audience inside it. Anything built beside the feed should be treated as temporary, however much investment it receives at launch.
The LinkedIn footnote worth knowing
If you are considering LinkedIn as an alternative place to build, note what you would own. Company pages are tied to verified employee admins and cannot be sold. LinkedIn newsletters can reach millions of subscribers, but only an estimated 35 to 60 percent of subscribers receive any given edition, and LinkedIn does not allow you to export subscriber email addresses. It is a rented list with no portability.
We go through what each platform actually lets you own in where else to build an audience.
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