What is more important, tweets/shares or traditional link building?

[Brother22]

SMM has a presence that is just growing and growing. I'm hearing all these back and forth talks about how tweets/shares are influencing rankings more than traditional link building would.

If so, would this be a short term ranking improvement, long term? What percentage would you say SMM (ranking factor) has when ranking a website in the SERPS.

[EGOL]

It depends what you are tweeting about.

If you are tweeting about garbage content (or even content that is a little better than average) then the benefit will disappear when the tweets roll deep into twitter.

However, if you are tweeting about awesome content then everybody will retweet, and those will retweet and lots of the people who see those tweets will link to your content from their blog submit it to digg and reddit.... it will be like throwing gasoline onto a fire.

The tweets will still roll deep into twitter but the glow over the web will be lasting.

[Brother22]

Yes, but let's say you have 100 retweets and than 100 new external links to your website. Which is going to be more beneficial?

[EGOL]

The links.... but you gotta get the retweets first.

[DanHill]

That last line was like poetry perfect answer to the question too!

[Brother22]

So with what I am gathering here, the retweets are going to be beneficial for quick rankings, and for what Google sees on the social side of things, the external links are going to have the long term effect but will not have as quick of an effect as the retweets would. Am I on the right path here?

[EGOL]

I operate on the assumption that the tweets will have zero value for rankings.  They are simply a way to spread the word about content and hopefully that word will spread to other social media channels.... then if the content is strong enough to earn links I will see ranking value.  I consider social media as a way to attract links without syndicating my content.