The short answer to this question is… No.

There are many reasons for this, one of the main reasons for this is because integrating social media into SEO algorithms would require a lot of work for little output. This is because social media is a very unreliable tool to prove engagement and mentions as people could very easily buy bots to appear that they have a lot of engagement and mentions but this is not the case and would turn SEO into an almost pay-to-win process.

However, the idea has been thought about by leading search engines such as Google. In 2014, Matt Cutts explained that it is an indirect and incomplete signal. As it requires a lot of computing power (and money) to monitor the millions of social media posts a day.

Another way many people believe that social media would affect SEO is by the number of useful links to external sites received from social media. This would be much easier to track but it still allows people to use bots to fool the system and this will always be a problem; even with Google’s most recent updates it is still very possible to bypass the system using simple programming languages such as Python.

Even though social media does not directly affect SEO, it can still be used to improve it. For example, using social media to promote your content and purchase products as you cannot fake product purchase this would have more of an effect on your SEO. the Instagram ‘promotion’ tools can help this a lot as you can either pay to reach more accounts or strategically use other features to get your content out there (such as hashtagging). Google’s Gary Illyes said in 2017, that if a brand unrecognised by Google starts getting many mentions online it could view it as an ‘entity’ which deserves more attention. He goes on to say that how people talk about you online might affect what you rank for.

What I think is the most important way to improve SEO using social media is to build partnerships with similar companies and influencers. If you make partnerships with other companies on social media they too can promote your content which in turn would increase the amount of usage to your website which would then increase your SEO. A quick, essential idea of getting the best out of exposure is to use the correct platform to promote your content. For example, youtube is the second biggest search engine so making promotional videos would make them appear higher on other search engines such as Google.

Overall, social media does not directly affect the SEO algorithms but there are many features used in social media to share your content, just keep in mind that you would need to constantly be interacting with other accounts, making sure your posts are relevant, paying attention to local marketing and being responsive to comments and shares.