Salesforce.com announced this week the development of the Service Cloud 2, an update to its Service Cloud released in January, which will help businesses integrate their Twitter marketing and crowdsource strategies with their Force.com platform.

This is important news for small businesses that are using Twitter for marketing and customer service, as they will now be able to monitor and track Twitter discussions from within the Force.com CRM platform. Small businesses will also be able to establish Twitter support channels for quicker solutions to customer service issues, and search Twitter discussions in real-time - an invaluable asset to businesses due to the constant attention that social media requires.

The new Service Cloud also allows integration with Google and Facebook, to help businesses better manage their crowdsourcing of customer questions, issues and ideas.

"With Service Cloud 2, Salesforce.com is doing for customer service what we did for sales: proving that the cloud is a better way," said Salesforce.com chairman and CEO Marc Benioff.

With Facebook having reached 250 million users and Twitter now at 45 million users, the business benefits of effectively leveraging the social media community are numerous.