For companies of all kinds, this is a welcome evolutionary step, says industry analyst Kevin Prouty of Aberdeen Group. The biggest benefit is simple -- by building social media tools right into ERP applications, the data can be sorted and saved as structured data about business customers and used for future analysis. If a business is using independent social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, that information can't easily be collected and used in the future to help drive business strategies. That loss of data is an opportunity that's being squandered if it can't be used, Prouty says.

"I've been to several conferences over the last few months and at every single one, this was a topic from the vendors," Prouty says. "Yes, businesses can communicate with their customers today using Facebook or other social media platforms. But if you start pushing them on it and asking how they think they'll use the information they gather there, you usually get the reaction that it will be for unstructured communications with customers."

That's where ERP vendors are now working to fill in the gaps so those customer interactions can help businesses grow, he says. "What they're trying to do is to capture a lot of this unstructured communication which goes on between the customers and companies. So then you get all the traditional data from the ERP system but you also have captured the social media communications as well."

That's a useful mash-up that's being sought by many businesses today, he says, because business leaders are beginning to see the broad value of those interactions.

Prouty says there's another key reason for this trend -- the next generation of workers who will be using ERP apps for the first time will have deep social media experience because they are already using tools such as Facebook and Twitter in their personal lives.