I know this sounds counterintuitive since FB likes/shares are behind a login wall but I've noticed a HUGE SURGE in search traffic for blog networks I handle when we did rolling campaigns of FB shares/Twitter retweets for certain 'seeder' or authority pages. Anyone else experience this? Theories? I'm thinking maybe it's not the FB/Twitter uptake as much as influential bloggers on Twitter/FB linking. Webmaster tools just hasn't picked it up yet. What do you think?
The short answer is: No. Facebook-Twitter traffic and link doesn't count as backlinks (they are nofollow'd anyways) and Google has no way to take them into account for SERP.
my theory is a link is a link if it is visible to search engines and if it is not coming from any objectionable website