The cloud ecosystem broke from its usual fixation on developers and business analysts last week to give social marketers their long-deserved share of the limelight. Salesforce.com Inc. provided the initial push with the release of a major update to its widely-used customer targeting platform that introduces the ability for organizations harness an important but often overlooked driver of online buying patterns: Pinterest.

Pins can now be created and scheduled through Salesforce Marketing Cloud for multiple accounts to bring products to the attention of the photo sharing network’s roughly 100 million active monthly users, an estimated 93 percent of whom have made a purchase based on advice from their fellow posters. That amounts to a potentially massive sales opportunity that the software-as-a-service giant will now be able to incorporate into its pitch for consumer-facing brands.

Their peers in the business-to-business segment, meanwhile, are turning to a startup called PeopleLinx Inc. for assistance with their social marketing efforts. Its namesake service provides capabilities for identifying executives who hold sway over their companies’ budgets on LinkedIn and determining the best way to reach out. Last week saw that functionality extended to Twitter, where a growing portion of decision-makers, particularly in the technology world, spend their time.

The importance of social engagement don’t stop at the major networks, however. It’s an equally significant factor in an organization’s internal operations and the productivity of its employees, which is what Atlassian Inc. hopes to improve with the latest addition to HipChat. The Connect programming interface enables partners to make services accessible directly through the Slack contender’s interface, eliminating the need for users to open a new tab and browse to their sites in order to view the full details of a notification from a colleague.

Photo via hongmyeon