Social (for now) is just one factor for rankings. Dont think of its primary role is for backlinks. Im not tweeting for backlinks. Im tweeting for BUZZ. Google is using this buzz as another piece of their ranking algorithm. Tweets are a totally separate ranking factor as is FB shares, and likes, with shares being more valuable. Just as quality, quantity, diversity, and velocity of links are separate ranking factors.
Social media is the evolution of online search and marketing. Its everything we have been doing but faster. Twitter is instant blogging. Facebook is the original AOL right? Make friends online, chat and leave them messages. The web is constantly evolving at a faster rate.
Current SEO practices have basically remained the same since I began in 1998, adding some changes over the years, and we will have to evolve into the social web. Over the past 15 years I have seen the changes leading up to this. In the early 90’s it was Infoseek that dominated the search space. Loading your webpage with your search terms got your 1st page ranking. As we came into the late 90’s the king was Yahoo and the “popular buzz” was the amount of backlinks to your site that ranked you higher. I proved this by ranking 10-15 of the top 20 positions on Yahoo from 1998 to 2002 and on Google in 2002-03 for “home loans”. Then as Google became the dominate player PageRank became another major factor and aged sites like mine had PageRank. This is the quality of inbound links. As the online digital age moves into an even faster way to communicate using social networks, Google will use these communication signals to determine what the “buzz” is and make that relevant in search results. This buzz started with meta tags keyword density, to amount of backlinks, to PR links, and is evolving to social media. I have continued to adopt new technologies early on which benefits me and my clients as we continue to rank 1st page for high traffic keywords.
But keep in mind its only one factor for ranking and not evenly weighted when its comes to using it for SEO. Social Media is still a great experiment. Lastly Twitter and Facebook have added search functions, Google added +1. These next few years are going to be very interesting to see who will dominate the Web for search.