You linking out is an outbound link. While its true that social media and lots of sites are no follow those links still have quite a bit of value. And while linking sites can certainly be bad it’s also not a 100% accurate statement. Citations are primarily from sites that mostly link out and they are pretty valuable links. There are tons of blog sites that exist to sell links that do have power and can help your site. Just as many of them are terrible.

My rule of thumb is if I interact with the site in real life and there is a place to stick my link I do. So my Amazon profile, microsoft, IBM and reddit all have links in my profile. You should have social media set up to link to your site. It can both drive traffic and provide valuable links. For example twitter nofollows all links but it’s a better way to get a link indexed than the indexing services.

Evaluate every site. If it’s a super spammy site dont get a link from it. If it’s a site Google trusts then it’s likely worth it. Do not buy links on fiverr that will more than likely hurt you. But if you are generating good content then you should absolutely bookmark it at bookmarking sites like pearl trees, scoop.it folkd and so on.