One of the great myths that every idiot and his dog seems to repeat online is that social media traffic is worthless and not worth chasing.

Absolute rubbish.

The misapprehension is based on the false premise that the only way to measure the worth of social media traffic is to drive it to a page and see if you can get them to buy something, click on your ads or otherwise monetise them in an immediate fashion.

And if you measure it on that short sighted scale then it is absolutely going to be difficult to recoup your investment. Unfortunately it also means that you aren’t particularly imaginative with your website or marketing and possibly that you are also lazy.

You are not going to make immediate sales off a product from most social media traffic by driving folks to a sales pitch. You need to think of other ways to take advantage of the flood of real visitors that can be driven to your site. Here are a few things you should be thinking about.

Your Content – The following pieces of advance assume that your content is awesome. Don’t throw up any old rubbish and expect this to work for you. You need to be producing great stuff.

Email Signups – Stumbleupon traffic and, to a lesser extent, Twitter traffic will not usually get their wallets out to buy whatever it is you are selling. However, they sure as hell will sign up to your email list if you make your content good enough.

Warm them up with further good content a few more times by email so they get trained into expecting awesome stuff from you and then every now and then throw in a monetised offer.
They will buy from your list and they will buy repeatedly if you have done this properly.

Links - Digg traffic won’t sign up to your email list in big numbers, but they will link to your content from around the internet which is great for SEO. Are you encouraging them to do that? Do your graphical elements encourage hotlinking (with a backlink of course)? Have you made it easy to link to your post from forums and blogs by providing the code or tools that make it easy for linkers?

You can get lots of links here and you can get quality links, but your content has to be prepared in a way that makes it easy for people to do that for you.

Snowballing Social Traffic – The great thing about social traffic is that they are sharers and love sharing good stuff. This tends to snowball. If a few share it, then a bunch more a likely to if you can gain momentum with the traffic.

Your job is to encourage them and make it easy for them to take that step. Do you offer the tools that allow folks to share your content easily on the social networks? If you run a blog, there is a great little plugin called socialise which detects which social network a visitor came from and displays a unique message for them. For example, if somebody comes from StumbleUpon then it says something like, “Hey SU visitor. Hope you like the content! Feel free to give us a thumbs up!”

Make it easy to share your stuff and your traffic will increase. Then you start getting more share, more links and more signups. None of this is rocket science but it does require a little imagination and a good amount of hard work.