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Ahh I see now! I was just reading that incorrectly. I thought the author was referring to those distribution services as the "standard newswire services". Thanks again!

I agree in this particular case the SEO value of their Twitter activity may not be all that significant, but there's no doubt that search engines are increasingly using social signals in their rankings algorithms. I like to say that social media has 'democratized' the web in a way. In the past, acquiring an in-bound link was like acquiring a 'vote' of sorts for your site. Today, you don't need to have a website in order to 'vote'. When someone follows/likes/+1s you, it's a vote of sorts. I'm not suggesting that individual follows or likes are the equivalent of a good inbound link. Search engines want to rank websites that they feel are both relevant to the user's search query, and websites that they feel are authoritative. There has been much discussion about search engines looking at things like your 'retweet ratio' or your 'follower to following' ratio. If those types of ratios are 'favourable' that sends a signal to a search engine that you are 'authoritative'.