I think this article should help you out - Social Media Marketing. Further, sites like FB, Twitter and Digg are often a good way to collect valuable backlinks. Also these are a form of "profile backlinks" as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnhK_BvrrcA&feature=channel_video_title check this video.. was posted by Matt Cutts.. It should give you a little information about social media with regards to seo...
From the video from Matt Cutts, it clearly show that they are looking at all the social marketing a website is doing so start spending time to develop your social strategy into your SEO strategy
By using social networks you can easily find people with the same interests and by that you can efficiently get your message out to a specific target market. And the best thing is it's for free.
Social media creates a buzz around your website that the search engines cannot ignore. You have to bear in mind that FB is now bigger than Google, so the search engines have to pay attention to what is going on in the social media sites so they can stay relevant. Having a lot of good social media backlinks will allow your site to rank higher than the competition who is not using social media as an option.
social media means that you disseminate the information through the media-friendly and read by many people.
Social media is the SEO practices over social networks like FB, Myspace, Twitter, etc as large no of users use them, so catching their attention means a lot of traffic to your site. For instance creating a Business Fan page on FB would get u to know the customer feed back about your products and contents of your site, thus generating healthy traffic
Hey rtyhgn85, Social Media can be used for a variety of different things for SEO. Just to name a few, social media can provide content for your site, generate viral traffic, and provide links and backlinks to and from your website. Social Media is a great tool for SEO and should never be overlooked. Best of luck to you! -LeadBoltMatt