Given the immense growth of social media sites over the past six years and the importance of link building in search engine marketing, it's not surprising that one common and flawed question continues to come up every few months: "How much of an effect do social media sites have in determining our website's visibility and PageRank?"
The simplest answer is: little to none. Generally speaking the largest social networking and social bookmarking sites provide very little utility when it comes to link building. While many sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Del.icio.us, YouTube and even Flickr once allowed unfettered direct linking, nowadays many social media sites have been obfuscating off-site links with page forwards, frames, and the more common "nofollow" anchor tag restriction. These small changes have essentially nullified any previous and current efforts to improve a site's Google PageRank via social networks.
Naturally, from an SEO perspective, this brings us back to square one. If it isn't possible to effectively utilize social media to increase your website's visibility, then what inherent value does it even have?
One of the best approaches is to think of your social media pages as being micro-sites for your preexisting base of customers; they can serve as convenient locations where you can provide former and current customers with content that's fresh, interesting, and immediate. Whereas you would normally apply a long-term strategy of attracting new customers to your company's website in the form of competitive SEO, a Facebook page is the perfect place to connect with current customers in order to create short-term conversion opportunities in the form of product announcements, discounts, and important company news.
That's just one example, of course. But it is one of the many opportunities that social media can provide your company if you approach it as a unique, social tool and not simply as a means for improving your PageRank.
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