A recent study is showing it is very important to have Facebook "Shares" and "Likes" for both high Google rankings as for driving traffic to your website.
If your facebook friends share information about your website it is even stronger then "Likes". So you should work at that.
Twiiter seems to be less powerful than thought by many. Facebook wins by far. Below is the more technical explanation which I am took over from the study:
Social Metrics are Well Correlated with Higher Rankings
To me, correlation alone is interesting because I want my sites/pages to be similar to the pages that rank higher in Google, irrespective of whether those traits are directly measured in the algorithm.
Pages that earn tweets + Facebook shares also correlate well with earning links, and send direct traffic on their own – ignoring these services at this point seems foolish.
Testing the Direct Impact of Facebook Shares on Google is Imperative
We’ve already observed several remarkable results from testing Twitter’s impact. Facebook should be next on the list for many search marketers.
Given the potential importance and the obvious direct impact (traffic from and visibility on Facebook itself), I, and probably many web marketers, need to examine successful strategies and brainstorm new ways to earn sharing activity from Facebook’s massive user base.
Facebook -Shares- Are More Valuable than Facebook -Likes-
In Facebook’s own environment, a "like" of content will show up on your own "Wall" and in "Most Recent" (a new feature as of last week), but it rarely shows in "Top News" where most users scan and click. If that alone isn’t reason to encourage sharing v. liking, the data above certainly is (at least to me).
Twitter May Be Less Powerful than Thought
The correlation data and the presence of tweets in SERPs was less, in comparison to Facebook, than I would have expected. It could be that in cases like those of our experiments, where many influential Twitter users shared a URL in close temporal proximity, Google takes it as a signal, yet for standard search rankings, it’s not as powerful.
We’ll definitely keep testing and watching, but my expectations for tweets correlating with rankings, after controlling for links, were higher, and thus the results, somewhat surprising.
