Bazaarvoice, a provider of hosted social commerce applications, has announced the SocialConnect suite to help brands safely and effectively leverage the power and reach of leading social networks to drive measurable business results. According to the company, the product suite transforms the way that marketers use popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter with exciting new capabilities for social sharing, social syndication, social applications and friends.

With SocialConnect, marketers can now extend the voices of their customers from their brand sites to social networks and collect consumer-generated reviews and stories directly on Facebook that can be pulled back to their site.

"Bazaarvoice helps brands connect with consumers over the social Web in ways that create authentic conversations and drive measurable sales," said Mike Svatek, chief product officer for Bazaarvoice. "We helped to invent social commerce as a market category, and we continue to lead this industry by innovating and staying ahead of the trends. Our Bazaarvoice Labs team has created, tested, and launched several pioneering capabilities in the social space that are now must-have features for our clients, and SocialConnect embodies all the best of their findings."

According to the company, Bazaarvoice continues to integrate with the largest consumer destinations in the world, including an industry-first partnership with Google to bring ratings and reviews into Google Search and Ads. Now SocialConnect provides brands with an industry-first toolbox for integrating social channels like Facebook and Twitter into a broader social marketing strategy that engages customers and drives measurable return on investment. SocialConnect is built on the Bazaarvoice social commerce platform that powers success for more than 850 brands worldwide and seamlessly integrates with the Bazaarvoice social commerce suite, including Ask & Answer, Stories and Ratings & Reviews.

Key SocialConnect capabilities and corresponding features include:

• SocialConnect Sharing enables shoppers to share consumer-generated content from the corporate or brand website to their personal profiles on the social networks. 
• SocialConnect Syndication capabilities allow marketers to easily leverage the power and reach of Twitter by engaging consumers 24/7 with relevant authentic content created by brand enthusiasts.
• TweetConnect empowers marketers to share the voices of their customers on corporate Twitter accounts, tweeting new reviews, answers, and stories that other consumers find informative and helpful. The brand controls what is tweeted when with filters at the category, rating, and product level. Each tweet is directly linked to a brand’s purchase path in order to maximize sales opportunities. TweetConnect also ensures that shoppers’ opinions are findable through Twitter search and real-time search results from Google, delivering unparalleled search value for Bazaarvoice clients.
• SocialConnect Applications allow marketers to integrate consumer-generated content from a brand’s website directly with their corporate presence on social networks so that customers can interact with this information wherever they consider "home." Now, using SocialConnect Applications, Bazaarvoice clients, as well as their agencies and partners, can develop custom experiences within Facebook and other social networks, adding user favorites, opinions and top-rated products directly to their Facebook fan page, for example.
• SocialConnect Friends helps consumers find trusted reviews from their friends without ever leaving the brand site. It answers the question: What is the best product based on what my Facebook friends or my Twitter followers like?  Users simply sign into Facebook, Twitter or MySpace at a brand site and reviews from their friends are surfaced to the top of the list of reviews.

"Bazaarvoice Labs is continually experimenting with the next ROI-driving technologies that will define the future of social commerce, and our recent work with Intuit on their ‘Friends Like You’ initiative is a great proof point," said Svatek. "Intuit customers were able to easily narrow down reviews on TurboTax.com based on their Facebook friends’ opinions or on a combination of life attributes like ‘I am married’ and ‘I have my own business.’ Bringing the social context of the people who are writing and reading product-related content into the brand experience is a tremendous next step for online word of mouth and an exciting complement to social sharing, syndication and applications."