This is why I love SEO.
When it comes to search engine optimizing content for major search engines no matter how much popularity a social medium platform seems to have (or lacks due to 
generation preferances or bad press) you can always optimize social media pages to show up in search engines. After all, at the end of the day a social media page is just a page regardless of the domain it’s a part of.
So, what does this mean?
This basically means that all those free social media pages you created by themselves may seem limited and practically useless for business development, like Instagram with it’s lack of ability to post a clickable link in a post, LinkedIn with it’s restricted network making it so that you can only connect to certain people at a certain time, and Facebook with it’s elite-ism among it’s users (try friend requesting someone you don’t know and don’t be surprised if they don’t accept it), but in truth they are all extremely useful. If it’s a page that can show up in Google, Bing, Yahoo, or even DuckDuckGo (yes people are starting to use this search engine more) then it’s a page with potential value.
Today, my Facebook page is ranking on the first page of Google for some of my major keywords. As someone who strives daily (weekends too!) to grow his business seeing one of my social media pages on the first page of Google is huge. I don’t even use FB much since I never really got into social media much. I’m pretty old fashioned, I prefer to call, text, or email people I want to talk with rather than use social media for this. This doesn’t mean that I don’t understand how valuable a free page on the Internet can be. It improves my search engine “estate” a great deal when I rank these types of pages.
In conclusion, social media is a valuable tool simply because it can provide a business with more free exposure in search engines even if the social media platform itself seems to lack any business development advantage for a business. A free page online can be a powerful promotional tool if effective SEO practices are applied to it.