With the ruling of Facebook and Twitter in the web and Google making them part of their Real Time Search technology along with other social media sites, it seems like search engine optimization this 2010 and the upcoming years will be dependent on Social Media. And why not?

Gather links
SEO Professionals can easily gain valuable links from social media sites. There’s no harm in doing it. Wether it’s dofollow or nofollow as long as it’s not coming from a bad community (eg. porn), it’s always as good as any link that you’d like to have for your site not to mention that it’s natural, you didn’t buy it nor reciprocated for it.

Alert the people
You can spread the word easily. Even if it’s the biggest or the smallest story to tell, it will crawl the web by having a huge network. You can get people talking about your product in Youtube and Digg. You can even use it for reputation management, directly communicating with your customers, or using the pages a social media generate to spread positive awareness about your product or company’s services.

Be more Visible
Social media sites have their own place in search engines, not mere locations but authoritative ones. It will help you gain rankings in search results thru their own pages.