Search engines are starting to publicly announce how they’re incorporating social media into their organic search engine rankings. So, let’s take a look at what Google has said and how it should affect you.
Specifically, Google is sticking by its preference toward link authority when it comes to social media. When a Web page or article is linked or re-tweeted via Facebook or Twitter, Google sees that not only as an authority measurement, but of a relevance measurement in terms of recency chronology. And they are using that to enhance both their organic rankings and their specific news result rankings.
Google also claims to be calculating author authority to know how much weight to give the social media call-out. These authority rankings are what Twitter has been talking about releasing through their Twitter Reputation Scores. It’s unlikely that these authority scores match perfectly, but interesting that just as Google gives sites a page rank score, that they feel the need to give individuals one as well.
As far as how Google treats Facebook, they claim to treat links on Facebook fan pages the same way as they do Twitter links. But they are not currently using nor do they have access to personal Facebook wall pages.