So you still can’t convince yourself or the powers that be that the social three – social media, social networking and social marketing – are anything more than an excuse to play on the computer during work hours?

There has to be more to it than participating for the purpose of winning new business, enhancing customer service, providing offers and notification via inexpensive channels, disseminating press releases and general promotions, managing brand and reputation, creating awareness, promoting your knowledge experts and competitive intelligence, right?

Well, there is another reason, albeit often overlooked, for joining the social fray. We can use various social sites and services to bolster off-site search engine optimization (SEO). This is possible because search bots are constantly crawling popular social sites, and in some cases even paying for direct access to the data, in order to provide real-time user-generated content to their users.

We can use this increased awareness of new content by putting our articles and links where the search engines are most frequently crawling. This is especially helpful during initial site launches or after a period of your site’s prolonged inactivity. If you haven’t updated your website in six months, Google is likely to find and index your new content faster via a social bookmark, Facebook page, Twitter profile or RSS feed than it is via a link buried on your website.

To understand this better, it helps to think of your site as having a search bot crawl rate and crawl budget. The crawl rate simply indicates how often the search bots are willing to come back to your site, which of course is to some degree dictated by how frequently they encounter new content when doing so.

The crawl budget would be an indicator of how much time, per visit, they are going to spend investigating new content they do find. The latter seems to surprise people, as they often assume that Google, for example, will stay and index everything that you have changed every time.

The problem is that the search bot most likely didn’t schedule to index hundreds of new pages on a visit where they rarely see one new page.

Now, for the final incentive for putting this all in motion: as you re-distribute content to these off-site social media sites, you are creating backlinks to your pages.

Backlinks are simply when a site or page other than your own links back to yours. This is one of over 200 signals Google looks for in determining the placement of your site and its pages in search engine result pages (SERPS).

Note that I mentioned backlinks going to pages, not the site. It is important for backlinks to not only go to your root domain name, but to also go directly to pages within your site that have keywords and subject-relevant copy. After all, when someone performs a search query, they want to find a page containing the information related to those keywords.

Using social media for search engine optimization can be as simple as automatic distribution of the content to the social sphere or it can be based on an internal methodology for new content distribution.

The effectiveness and time investment will largely be dependent on how competitive the keyword terms are that you’re trying to rank in and how active your competitors are.

Get started with these simple steps:

• Make sure your company Facebook page and Twitter account are kept up to date with links to new posts on your website.
• Encourage employees on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Buzz, and Twitter to promote links to new content on your website.
• Create a company Google Profile page and use anchor-text-laden links back to key sections of your website.
•  Create Twitter lists related to your industry and add them to Listorious. Then make sure links to your site appear in those lists.
• Add all your social accounts into an aggregator like FriendFeed.
• Use social bookmarking sites like delicious, stumbleupon, yahoo buzz, etc. to bookmark new posts.
• Add your RSS feed to sites like tumblr, netvibes, pageflakes
• Use Google Webmaster console to monitor your crawl rate.

In my next article, I will tackle social media optimization and how to manage social media effort and time.

It’s difficult to miss the transition that offline and online marketing is undergoing right now. And while it’s in vogue to discuss the decline of traditional marketing, traditional marketing isn’t alone in facing stiff competition for budget.

Recently, Ben & Jerry’s informed e-mail subscribers they would no longer be receiving a newsletter but should instead connect with the brand via their Facebook page, which was already 1.3 million fans strong.

I am not suggesting you shelve other programs, but it’s certainly time to see how social media can fit into your current or future marketing efforts.

To make it easier to jump in, let’s start with the premise that you are already, to some degree or another, participating in similar activities via offline methods. You see, social media is actually three separate components we refer to as The Social Three, which mirrors methods you are accustomed to and have been using for years.

Let’s take a look at each:

Social media represents the tools available to get the word out, increase visibility and speak to a specific niche, market or demographic. In other words, you use social media to speak to those who have selected it as their preferred channel. After all, what medium requires 100 percent adoption to be considered viable for marketing efforts? There is no shortage of outlets, with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Youtube, to name but a few.

Social networking is the day-to-day interaction we have with current or future ideal customers, groups or segments. In short, it is business and/or personal networking, just online.

Networking has long been used as an excellent way of extending and optimizing your circle of influence. The online method is just as applicable.

Social marketing is the subtle, or not so subtle, use of one or more online tools to promote your business, content, service, offers, expertise and promotions to the networks you have established.

We expect our vendors, VARs, dealers and employees to talk well of us, and this is simply another place for them to have a voice.

The real question is how to extract return on investment (ROI) out of social media in a cost-effective and time-conscious way. This is where social media optimization (SMO) comes in.

It is important to develop a plan to maximize your reach with minimal manpower and man hours.

Consider these takeaway steps:

• Develop an elevator pitch and adapt it for use as a bio for each social media profile you create.
• Use a free service like namechk.com to secure your brand’s social IDs.
• Schedule social media outbound activity for peak times.
• Use tools like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite or Seesmic to consolidate accounts and narrow focus to keywords and actionable alerts.
• Delegate responsibility and use “post once” services (with caution).
• Sign up for a url-shortening service like bit.ly which will aid in tracking online marketing reach.
• Use business-driven metrics like mentions, interactions and traffic for awareness, then conversion funnels, leads and sales for ROI.

Still not convinced that utilizing The Social Three in your marketing mix is important? In an upcoming article, we will discuss the affect of social media campaigns on your search engine optimization efforts and additional SMO techniques.