Social networks are a kind of Google search engine but controlled by the people, and are quite fair when providing visits to a site. If your content is good, and well shared, and if your content is bad is not shared and do not arrive visits (unless you do some kind of traps).
There is little mystery. If you think your content is of great quality you have to increase your emphasis on social media, because it will be the best SEO you can do. If your content is spam better looking other strategies, or read other articles from my blog: D
Social networks do not penalize, are quite fair and impartial and have a ratio of commitment on the part of the much larger that visits by search engine users. On the other hand it has been more than demonstrated that the links that spread through social networks are considered by Google, so kill two birds with one stone: White Hat SEO and social marketing.
How do you get more followers?
One thing I’ve learned is not to resort to practices totally spammers to achieve increase our followers on social networks. It makes sense, what we want to increase our followers to either coast or then not going to be interested?
Many users use software or Twitterboost to increase the number of followers and thus appear more important in these networks, and maybe this at the beginning to have positive effects (it is easier for someone follow me on Twitter if you see that I have 1,000 followers that if I have 5, lol) but long term it makes little sense.
Forget bots or at least forget them once you have 200 or 300 followers and concentrate on achieving real followers who are interested in your content. What is the goal? That all visitors arriving to your blog have full visibility of your social networks: you have to put them face to face with the option to follow you, and once there, the user decide whether to follow. Before using any service or tools check concept of social proof of the service.
Obviously, being active in your networks
This is something that I have to put my batteries. If you get to sail on Twitter’ll find hundreds of users that have thousands and hundreds of thousands of followers, and most shocking of all is that many of them do not even have a website. Simply are Twitter users who have achieved great fans thanks to his activity, his publications, his jokes, his polemics, etc.
Do not just use your social networks to publish your articles, photos to interact with users, try everyday and topical issues, generate healthy polemics, etc. If you look at my favorite social networking (Google Plus and Twitter) I do, but should more actively participate in both. Anything being in the spotlight brings you followers.