Social shares of a particular page

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Webado C Webada: This belief some hold is what`s creating the social media spam these days. I simply cannot believe that Google would even consider this as any kind of signal except maybe of spam.
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  Neil Cheesman: In my niche, there are a handful of websites that rank seasonally - not for seasonal keywords but for all-year-round keywords.... traffic and social popularity are likely to have some influence imho - the other major factor is backlinks - but these won`t be varying to any great degree.... Surely, it is likely that Google may well be picking up `mentions` of a website or on a social media platform and this in turn, will contribute to a `ranking signal`...
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  Alan Bleiweiss: Meh. People have claimed "likes" matter to SEO for years, and it`s not reality. Maybe "shares". Possibly even a direct ranking boost from those shares, though I don`t know of any data proving it. What matters with more real data based correlation, is if you get enough traction when posting a link to a page or post on your site, it`s often a case where an increase in organic searches happens, based on that post getting traction. I have a number of clients who get this impact. That, in turn, shows an increase in interest, value, and relevance of that content on the web site. So from that perspective, social can impact SEO.
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  Neil Cheesman: What I dislike as much as anything is when you type a search query in and get three results from the exact same website...
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  Eren Mckay: I don`t agree with number of social shares impacting Google rankings greatly; simply because this is easily gamed by black hats creating thousands of shares from fake accounts. Rather, I would think that in certain verticals WHO shares your content (as in: is this person an influencer in that niche?) may make a dent.
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  Neil Cheesman: Certainly agree that `influencers with "mentions" could make a difference.. but what IF those influencers are also on social media - I have heard the term `Buzz` mentioned... not a bad way of labelling it... maybe the social share/mention itself doesn`t create an influence in the serps but it helps generate the wave of influence....
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  David Ogletree: Google is going to continue to dumb down their results. Google is almost unusable these days for anything other than a search for Kardashian level content. Google is just baffled if you type in something that is not mainstream. They try so hard to guess what you mean they completely ignore what you actually typed in.
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  Neil Cheesman: We have three Tweets from yesterday showing on Google... in the `Tweet Box` above the serps...
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  Eren Mckay: Neil Cheesman yeah I`m specifically referring to social shares by influencers. I believe that Google`s algortihm already weighs entities.