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.