Using Social Media as Your Primary Link Building Tactic Won`t Work

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

• 
  Juchel De Leon: Do you agree or any opinion with regards to the article from +Rand Fishkin posted at #moz #whiteboardfriday that using Social Media as Your Primary (or Only) Link Building Tactic Probably Won't Work?
  
  Just give me a quick thought!
  Thanks!
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  Dave Elliott: https://moz.com/blog/social-media-as-your-primary-link-building-tactic-probably-wont-work-whiteboard-friday is the article
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  Dave Elliott: My view is this piece is fundamentally flawed. It at no time points out that getting links is not necessarily the goal of social amplification.
  
  Who cares if you are getting links or not as long as people are digesting the content and converting on your site!
  
  If people find the content useful for their websites users they will link to it, if they find it interesting or entertaining they may further amplify it by sharing.
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  Elisabeth Bobeck (Liz): Rand and Moz have been pushing people away from using Links and instead using content as the driving source. Been happening over the last year, and now with Moz Rank, its becoming part of your ranking too.
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  Juchel De Leon: +Dave Elliott thanks for your interesting pointers! ; :)
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  Juchel De Leon: +Elisabeth Bobeck Thanks for your thoughts! :)
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  Edwin Jonk: When it comes to correlation I normally ask the Data Marketeer +Micah Fisher-Kirshner ;and ;https://plus.google.com/+MicahFisher-Kirshner/posts/avdXkDx4Gj2 versus ;https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/correlations#8
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  Micah Fisher-Kirshner: Quick note: The article referenced by the video (https://moz.com/blog/content-shares-and-links-insights-from-analyzing-1-million-articles) was a fairly good analysis.
  
  The rest of the video I didn't watch, mostly because didn't want to spend time on something I've noted often in the past on the data that they had analyzed incorrectly and are now correcting (so to speak).
  
  As for only one's tactic, that'll depend on your short-term to long-term goals. There are many interesting business models (viralnova, buzzfeed, etc) that play only on social media to then build their business to other areas.
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  Steve “berto” Bertolacci: I think what gets glossed over too easily is the sliding scale of what works. Both Twitter and G+ social shares will prompt GoogleBot to index the page and site. But once you've gone past that first stage, getting something to rank competitively still requires a lot more that also involves links.
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  Micah Fisher-Kirshner: +Steve Bertolacci ;Quite fair to say! I'd add that tweets can also show up in SERPs too, so it can help be a brand builder that may in turn provide links.
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  Dave Elliott: I believe all twitter links are no follow so WONT help you get indexed. pretty sure i saw a case study confirming this last week....will see if i can dig it out.
  
  g+ for indexation is awesome though!
  
  
  Read through the article im wrong...it was saying didnt help ranks as below...oops.
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  Steve “berto” Bertolacci: I've been running some small tests on new blogs where one only got links from Tweets and the other only got links from G+ posts. Each was at 0 pages indexed prior to those social mentions, then started getting crawled immediately after. I haven't seen any other results for those social mentions improving rank however -- just the crawl. With our main blog, what gets each individual post to outrank for a competitive term is a totally different ball game. In those cases, the social mentions only serve to get direct traffic, but do little to affect the organic rank.
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  Juchel De Leon: All of you have a great opinion and perspective on this matter and I do appreciate- my thought in this aspect is that social presence is ways of extending your arms to your audience, we believe that most of the time our target audience are using social media in their daily lives and that is a fact, while social signals are treated by google as probably "just" a signal, we can see and check in google analytics that google has its own way on how to measure this signals, which probably means that google doesn't really count social signals as part of their ranking and yes quiet right that this social signals are being indexed by Google, but it is being indexed and acknowledge as part of the social media website, and not an independent one, since social media can also consider as search engines and they have their own statistic on how to measure a page or business account that are listed on their site. This is just my thoughts basically!