One more vote for social media over SEO, as one of the major five non-ranking methods of getting targeted traffic to a site. Like the other effective non-SEO methods (traffic-hijacking high ranking pages via their comment sections, video marketing, hi-traffic niche forums, comments on major sites like YA or Wikipedia), social marketing make you less reliant on Google, or totally independent if you want to avoid their shackles. You can focus on bigger niche keywords that are hyper competitive, because you're not trying to rank for them. And social media permits one to get more relational and engaged with a demographic than SEO could do.