Facebook Inc.’s efforts in the enterprise collaboration market received a high-profile boost today.

The social network announced that it has signed up Nestle S.A, the world’s largest food and beverage brand, as a customer for its Workplace team chat platform. The deal encompasses hundreds of thousands of employees. Nestle rolled out the service to 210,000 of its workers in recent months and plans to onboard thousands more this year.

“The impact was immediate, with 25 times higher engagement per post and very high rates of mobile adoption,” Catherine Flynn, Facebook’s global director of marketing for Workplace, wrote in the blog post announcing the deal. “Managers are using Live video to connect directly with employees at different locations, while sales teams are using Workplace for daily check-ins and to share information and best practices.”

The Live video streaming tool is one of several features that Facebook has carried over from its social network to Workplace. These capabilities represent one of the main ways the service sets itself apart from more popular alternatives, most notably Slack.

Facebook argues that Workplace has a lower learning curve than the competition because most people already know how to get around its social network. This familiar interface, in turn, can theoretically make it easier for large enterprises to introduce the service to their global workforces. Making sure that employees are comfortable with a service’s controls is a key requirement to achieving regular use.

The vote of confidence from Nestle should bolster Facebook’s efforts to sell large enterprises on the service. The social network could certainly use the boost: Workplace had just 30,000 customers when the company last disclosed adoption figures in November 2017.

For comparison, Slack reported the following May that more than 8 million daily active workers across 500,000 organizations were using its service. Some 3 million of those users had paid accounts. Microsoft Corp.’s competing Teams platform, which launched a few months after Workplace, has 329,000 customers as of September.

Nestle is one of several major brands that have chosen Workplace over its more popular rivals. Other notable customers include Walmart Inc., Domino’s Pizza Inc., Booking.com Inc. and Spotify AG.

Photo: Facebook