Gartner: Social CRM Market Will Reach $1B In Revenue By 2012

There’s more good news for the growth of the social enterprise. Gartner is reporting today that the social customer relationship management (CRM) market is forecast to reach over $1 billion in revenue by year-end 2012, up from approximately $625 million in 2010. Worldwide social CRM is projected to total $820 million in 2011.

Gartner says that spending by buyers on social software for marketing, customer service and sales has increased by 40 percent in 2010, but social CRM remained less than 5 percent of the total CRM application market. And more than 100 vendors have social CRM offerings, but most are not profitable and generate annual revenue of less than $1 million.

While the market is clearly competitive, Gartner says that certain factors can help differentiate Social CRM offerings, including interoperation between public social networks and internal collaborative communities, integration with established CRM products, analytics and more.

There’s no doubt that there is growth in the social enterprise in general. And there’s a lot of movement already taking place in the space. Jive just filed for a $100 million IPO, and Salesforce is making big bets on the space with Chatter.