Traffic to websites only becomes an asset when it translates into something，such as becoming a bookmark, a sign-up, a link, or helps establish a genuine relationship. It must also result in an increase in revenue. If it doesn't, then traffic remains an expense.
Most of the people on social networks aren't interested in commercial messages. Thus traffic from social media marketing isn't priced higher, because it isn't translating into revenue for the advertisers. This isn't happening because the intent of the users when engaged with social media campaign is not conducive to selling stuff.
There indeed are some niches that do just fine with social media marketing traffic, but they would pretty much have to be targeted to time wasters and that age group for it to really work.
One solution is using it as a link building strategy, an effective technique if your content is linkworthy, unfortunately many sites that get exposure don't get many links out of it. Links and exposure can be generated through social media marketing, but it has to be done right, and if your bottom line relies on sales conversions from that traffic, then that really isn't where you should be spending your efforts.
For instance, there is a case that a company came off of doing a digg campaign that resulted in over 45,000 visitors. All garbage visits of course but they resulted in links which translated to a 30 place jump in Google. That's a very tangible and measurable result.
If you look at social media marketing like Digg for conversion, It will never work. But if it's used correctly, it can be leveraged for successful monetization in a round about way. It's not "brand spend", it's a way to expose people to a page and have them give you a link. Dollar for dollar, it can be the most cost effective way to build links and should be looked at as just one part of an overall campaign. Ignoring it because it's hard or because it doesn't work the first couple of times is not a great way to approach it.
In summary, traffic from social media marketing is not traditional traffic as before, thus it should be carefully viewed and used.
