We recently held a poll here on ICSmag.com that asked just how important you all valued social media. Surprisingly, the majority of those polled either answered with either “Too soon to gauge – We do it, but we haven’t’ really seen significant payoff yet” (50%) or with “Not important – we’re doing just fine without it” (29%).

Well here’s a reason why those of you that aren’t using social media should start – and start now. From Distilled, an online marketing information website:

“Over the last year or two, Google has begun integrating “social signals” into its algorithms for creating search results. Google is able to see the number of “likes” a page gets (which could be tweets on Twitter, likes/shares on Facebook, +1s on Google+, etc) as well as the personal connections between the users of these social sites. They’ve publicly talked about using the number of shares on Twitter, and SEOmoz data suggested a correlation between Facebook likes to a page and its ranking position.”

That’s right – social media presence is beginning to affect how often your business appears in search engine results. So for those of you out there that scoff at the impact that social media could have on your business…

(Stay locked in here as our ICS web marketing guru John Braun is sure to have a much more in-depth look at this in a future issue of the magazine.)