Generally, anytime you have your site is mentioned on the web, it helps your rankings, Social media will play a larger and larger role as the value of backlinks diminishes.
This will forever be the way Google does business: They decide what indicates a good web site and lets this information out to the public. Immediately, people come up with ways to game the system. Soon there are so many people gaming the system, they change the system.
Yesteryear, you could just put keywords in your web page and the search engines would send you traffic related to the keywords. Then people started to game the system, so search engines reduced, then eliminated, the value in these keyword tags.
Today backlinks are all the rage for increasing your ranking. This is because, in the past, when someone linked to your site, they were essentially saying they like your site and wanted to share it with other people. Backlinks then became the must do SEO essential.
So what did everyone and his brother do? Started hustling for backlinks. Look at article marketing. At first these links were golden. Then the article directories became spam mills, and Google decided to devalue a ton of these links. In one fell swoop, millions upon millions of man-hours and dollars spent on this low quality content from article spinning and spamming went right out the window. Today these links are of far more value to the average web site for the traffic they bring in than the SEO value.
The assault on backlink value continues today, and in time something may come along that supplants it. In fact today, at the local SEO level, local web citations is already replacing global backlinks in terms of ranking value.
Just like article marketing, Social media is going to play a major role for a few years, then it will become spammed to death, and all the value from it will be gone.
Great content, and lots of people talking about your site trumps everything, and always will.
