Bazaarvoice, the market and technology leader in hosted social commerce applications that drive sales, today unveiled new Social Network Accelerators to help its clients effectively leverage social networks in their social commerce strategies. Bazaarvoice, which pioneered the social commerce market, launched ShoutIt! in 2007 to help marketers amplify the voices of their most influential customers on social networks. The company continues to lead the industry in defining new ways to maximize measurable ROI from social initiatives.

With the new Social Network Accelerators, Bazaarvoice ensures that companies achieve more from social commerce by using social networks like Facebook and Twitter as a distribution channel for user-generated content created on brand sites. The new capabilities also help companies strategically plug into social networks to drive participation and gain valuable customer data that can be used to optimize the user experience on eCommerce and brand sites.

“Twitter is posting 1,928% year-over-year growth. Facebook has more than 87 million unique monthly visitors and is the fourth most visited website in the world. Clearly there is a tremendous marketing opportunity in these numbers, but most efforts to date have fallen flat,” said Brett Hurt, founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice. “Our new Social Network Accelerators give brands a blueprint for plugging into social networks in the right way to drive sales. It all starts with engaging users through social commerce applications such as Ratings & Reviews, Ask & Answer, and Stories – and gives brands an integrated strategy to tap into social networks for better distribution, participation, and profile information.”

“Bazaarvoice has been a consistently forward-thinking partner in terms of social media,” said Dmitri Siegel, Managing Director of Urban Outfitters. “We’re very excited to continue to work together to engage our community through social networks and get measurable results from our social commerce implementation. We are very happy to have Bazaarvoice as a key strategic partner in our integrated social strategy.”

Like all Bazaarvoice offerings, the Social Network Accelerators are designed to meet the needs of large brands with the industry’s best technology, client services, community moderation, analytics, and partner integrations. More details are in the full news release.