Facebook is useless for ranking self hosted pages.

Since Facebook backlinks are nofollow, it's completely useless and won't contribute to the ranking of your site.

Facebook does increase social awareness of your website. Google loves social indicators so take that into account.

Andrew,

Directly -- Possibly, since social signals could be part of Google and Bing's ranking parameters, though I think it doesn't have significant direct positive effect to get excited about; and

Indirectly -- It depends, since if your content has the potential to go viral and if many of your target viewers own relevant niche sites or blogs and if a few of your viewers are journalists or creatives in popular news or multimedia portals who could pick up and syndicate or write about your viral content and give you links, then you could get natural links from niche-authority sites and blogs with decent PR...

Yes. Facebook helps in SEO.
Even though the links are no follow but Google takes social indicators in account for SEO and also if your content goes viral it drive huge amount traffic to your site.

I agree - it might not help in rankings but the traffic does increase. Though that kind of a traffic might backfire your AdSense, at times.

Facebook might not be as Hot as Twitter, but it can offer you what you need depending on the audience you are targeting.

Not so helpful but helps in business,without facebook traffic can be generated easily through seo.

if you have a large FB page it can help your business grow but not the SEO

Facebook is a social media site.It is used to get huge traffic and target customers only.

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It might not help in ranking but it will surely increase the traffic to your site