What's the value of Twitter and Pinterest links?

[bjs2010]

Just wondering should part of my regular activities include sharing certain URL's to these social networks?

Presumably it requires constantly mentioning random pages as part of an ongoing nature...

Any pointers?

thanks

[Mike_Davis]

You posting links to Twitter or Facebook or any of the other social networks will do almost nothing for SEO.  What will help is if people consume your content and socially share it themselves.  There is no hard and fast rule as to how much Google or Bing takes social shares into account but no one doubts that it does serve as an indicator (don't ask Cutts about this...).

Social is also a great way to earn links.  Social shares get your content in front of people (and potential links) way quicker than search. Here is a nice article about this by Top Rank: <a>http://www.toprankblog.com/2012/07/social-media-links/</a>

I hope that helps!

P.S. Stop looking for easy links.  They don't exist anymore.  Very sad.

[MikeRoberts]

Links from those social sites are often either not crawlable or nofollowed... but what they do actually do is add to your social proof and add new avenues for people to find & share your content. We use Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest regularly for our ecommerce sites and share links to our pages where relevant. Pinterest has actually lead to a wonderful uptick in referral traffic on our site and our photos are regularly shared on people's design boards. This traffic tends to spend less time on site and view fewer pages... but even if only a handful convert then its still people we wouldn't have had if we never tried. Facebook doesn't send us as much traffic but is almost turning into an added level of Customer Service and allows us an easy means of conversing with potential customers. We also share other related pages' content, comment on other pages, and attempt to make ourselves a useful resources for people. Seems that nowadays if you have a business then its almost expected you will have an associated Facebook page. Twitter on the other hand has turned into a stream of pointlessness in my opinion but its likely the nature of our sites that make people less likely to interact and strike up a conversation. More work can be done there as we've seen people who have built great fan and customer bases through their twitter accounts.

All of these things though make us look more available, more professional, lead to more sharing of our content which in turn leads to more people who learn about us which in turn leads to new customers and more sales.

[jesse-landry]

Think marketing, not SEO. SEO is Marketing. Social media marketing is huge for all business/industries/service providers. These guys summed up the how and the why but I'm just saying... Forget about the link juice. That comes as a result of a kickass marketing campaign.

[keepkalm]

Twitter used to help a new site get indexed by Google a little faster, I don't think that it makes much of a difference now.

Pinterest links can show up as follow links, and a lot businesses use them to showcase products and link directly back to a product page for conversion. That's better than SEO frankly. Closing the loop for a quicker transaction.

I agree that you should focus on using these channels for the value they provide on their own, not for trying to game a particular search. I do think that there is value in SEO for creating these profiles, branded search is still important and it's always good to create potential SERP results for you brand.