Other than trying to monitor their private life, why would an employer encourage their employees to sign up to Facebook?

If the employees’ profiles are private, then the employer could not monitor anything, unless the employee Facebooks thru the company computer.

@jca Than what would be the reason for wanting them on Facebook?

@SQUEEKY2: I don’t know the answer to that. Maybe the boss just likes it and wants others to enjoy it too.

It could be malevolent and it could be out of the goodness of their hearts. No way for us to tell.

My advice would be to set up an account and promptly forget the password.

To monitor their private lives, of course. It has come about in the past few years that HR people while interviewing prospective employees have been asking not only if they have an FB account, but they also ask for their passwords. You can refuse as their is no law that requires you to give it up, but their is also no law that requires them to tell the truth when they explain why you weren’t hired.

They might just be trying to collect “likes” on the company page.

My guess is that they want the employees to say great things about them. This gives them free advertising.

I don’t ask my employees to join facebook, but if they are on Facebook, I encourage them to “like” our hospital page and it’s posts when they can so it stays more active.

(If users set their security settings correctly, the company cannot monitor their activity. And if a company asks for a password, they need to work for a different company.)

I worked in a manufacturing factory of 1,000 employees.

I joined Facebook to see the pictures of a friend’s family. Another friend found me and posted [what I considered to be] inappropriate cruise ship pictures to my “wall”. The next day, the Safety director at work sent me a friend request.

That’s the story of my 3 days with a Facebook account.

Ha, ha. Now they say that the NSA is stockpiling photos of people from social media, probably inspired by Facebook.

@ibstubro Wow you beat me, I signed up during the Askville strike and used my Askville name, and it was going for about 2 months and was getting super tired of complete strangers wanting to be my friend, I deactivated it then and never looked back.

Everyone – please be aware that many companies have software that monitors computer activities from their computers, no matter what your privacy settings are. I know the government agency that I work for does. So that’s why employees should be careful what they write on Facebook or other sites, if on a work computer.

@jca I think that is super advice for anyone using a company computer, they would have means to monitor what goes on with their computers.

@jca Very true. It always cracks me up how many people don’t realize this. I know a few people who have come up for promotions at the college I go to and their boss will check the computer log to see exactly what they’ve been doing. “Hmmm it appears in the last month you spent 45% of your on shift time actually on fb.” And like that, no promotion. If you’re going to fuck around at work, at least do it on your phone.

AT&T created their own Facebook styled social webpage, strictly for their employees. The idea was to build and maintain personal relationships with people from other workgroups, to help circumvent job responsibility issues, and get things done faster.

I can’t think of other reasons offhand.