If you really want to stay ahead, think like Google. What does a link represent? It represents one human being vouching for the quality of a website. In 1997, the best reliable way to do this was to count links and weight them based on their source. Blogging platforms got popular, there was more data and more room for abuse, so they kept doing their best.
Now Google hasn't changed what they're looking for. They still want to tally and weight votes from people, but where are the people? There are a fuckload more on the social media sites than there are on the web. Not only that, but if you have good content social media metrics are A LOT easier to build than web links ever were.
TL;DR stop thinking "links" and start thinking "votes". Who they're from still matters.