How much power does using keywords on Facebook and Twitter have from an SEO perspective?

[RobertHill]

Hi all,

When we add a new Christmas party package onto our website I always tweet about it with a link to the party page, utilizing a tweet such as : "New Manchester Christmas parties", followed by the link. How much power (if any) does utilizing the key phrase Manchester Christmas parties have on SEO for that page? Bearing in mind the link is shortened and doesn't mention the keywords anywhere in it, they are only present in the tweet itself. Similarly, on our company Facebook page I always post a link with a title such as "check out our new Manchester Christmas parties". Does this have much SEO benefit for the page I'm directing the link to? Many thanks!!

[SteveOllington]

Some.

I think that's all anybody knows right now lol.

I watched a seminar from Distilled's LinkLove set where it was explained that in an experiment, a bunch of retweets boosted a site with just one link above a competing, similar site with a lot more links.

The topic as a whole though seems to be in discussion a lot at the moment, with blogs, etc... talking about it, and of course research being posted here at SEOmoz.

I think the general consensus is that it has value, and that value is likely to increase, but I haven't seen anywhere as yet where there's much agreement about just how much value there is in it. I assume we'll be seeing something soon enough though

Please do anybody correct me if I'm wrong, it would be great to see if there are any hard & fast stats out there.

There is the ranking factors of course... which provide a good guideline: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-4