Like it or not, Twitter is becoming a bustling social marketplace for brands to engage with their audience on the Web. Now Salesforce.com is making it easier for companies to engage their users and track issues to resolution with their cloud offering.

Twitter just celebrated its third birthday this month and did so by posting record growth. Even Facebook has begun to replicate Twitter by focusing its activity feed more on users’ conversations.

Another thing driving conversations on Twitter is the high frequency of brands using the service to interact with their audience. On Facebook these kinds of conversations are generally ignored, but Twitter allows open and unfettered access to the companies using it.

Now that Twitter has created an environment where consumers and users can give feedback to brands, companies are having to adjust to this new method of interacting with their public. Many companies are not accustomed to being so transparent and available, but those that do so can thrive on Twitter.

However there’s no good way to track customer service issues on Twitter, which doesn’t even have an Inbox per se. So what were brands to do that wanted to engage customers and take feedback on their products?

Now Salesforce.com is getting ready to allow tracking of issues from Twitter in its cloud-based CRM services. Salesforce users could always open a ticket for each issue they found on Twitter, but that’s a relatively clunky and manual process.

Salesforce is going one step further by allowing you to proactively monitor your brand on Twitter. You’ll be able to set up searches on Twitter from within Salesforce, open the tickets and even respond using your corporate Twitter account, all from their internal dashboard.

In addition, the new feature in Salesforce’s CRM product will allow you to search Google in a similar fashion to find new sites, articles or blog posts related to your brand. This makes Salesforce a tool not just for managing your customers, but your entire brand across the social Web.

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Entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 9:54 am under Social Media.

Read more entries by Dave Jeyes.
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