The short answer to this is an unqualified yes.

The long answer involves exactly what it is that Google™ and search engines are looking for from social media.  You should be aware by now, that search engines spend an astounding amount of effort and resources analyzing the websites that link to your site.  The basic idea is that if your site is truly worthwhile and useful, other sites will link to it.  If no sites, few sites, or poor quality sites, link to you, then how useful could your site be?  How high you rank in search results today has vastly more to do with who links to you and how, than anything happening on your actual site.  In other words, search engines trust other sites to tell them about your site, more than they trust your site to tell them about your site.

In this mix of who links to you, search engines are looking for a surprising number of factors:

•    The diversity of types of sites that link to you (blogs, information sites, social sites, etc…)
•    The geography of sites that link to you
•    The quality of sites that link to you (based on the sites linking to them)
•    The diversity of top level domains linking to you (.com, .edu, .gov, .org, etc…)
•    The freshness of links to your site (recent links carry more weight than old ones)
•    And a dizzying array of other factors, including many technical factors

For a few years, Google has skirted the question of how much weight they put on links from social sites, but has recently (December 2010) disclosed that links from social sites like Twitter™ and FaceBook™ are trusted ranking signals (and while speculative, might have been ranking signals for long before Google admitted it).

How heavily do search engines rely on links from social sites?

Links from social sites, are certainly not the magic bullet.  However if your site has good links from many types of sites, but is under-represented in social sites, what does that say to search engines about your site?  If your site were really that good, wouldn’t there be lots of links from sites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube™, LinkedIn™, Delicious™, and others?   Because those links aren’t there, your site probably doesn’t rank as high as it should.

Furthermore, search engines are likely looking for a broad based coalition of users in those social services to link to you. In other words, you can’t fix the problem by simply creating a FaceBook fan page and dropping a link in it.  Nor by opening a twitter account and tweeting your URL.  The link from the fan page or twitter account will only have any value if search engines see fans and followers that make it authoritative.  And one account in a social site linking to you doesn’t say much.  Your site will rank better if there links from lots of real user accounts.

The good news is: with some simple and effective social media link building strategies, you can solve the problem and get a good link presence in social media sites with much less effort than you expect.

If you are concerned that you don’t have enough good quality links from social media sites, contact ibusolutions.com to request a free consultation.