One industry observer called Salesforce.com's move "incremental" but "interesting."

"Salesforce is showing that perhaps the best use of social networking is perhaps on the service side of CRM [customer relationship management] and not sales force automation," said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president, research, at Nucleus Research.

"The immediate advantage of this is for companies whose audience is teenage girls," she added. "They're constantly Twittering."

But before companies get enamored with the "next shiny thing," which could be Twitter, they need to mull over the potential return on investment, she said.