The Social Media Emperor Is Naked

Everyone even remotely involved with any ecommerce business over the last few years has heard how important social media is, experts have been dropping phrases like "paradigm change" and I'm getting bored of it.
 As figures begin to surface about how social media drives sales it's becoming clear that it's not the marketing holy grail that Facebook and the host of agencies would have us believe:

Survey data from Reuters/Ipsos shows that Four out of five users have never bought a product or service as a result of advertising or comments on Facebook.

Monetate's Q2 report showed that social referral traffic converted at 0.59% on average compared to 2.49% for search traffic.

So lets say you had an "average" ecommerce site and you wanted to add 10% to your sales as part of a marketing project. You'd need to deliver more than four times more traffic to achieve this growth by social media referrals than by increasing your search traffic.
This would be fine if it was four times as cheap/easy to deliver traffic from social, but social requires constant   activity to engage with people and encourage them to follow/like your site, it can become a real time suck, and it often ends up drawing in people from elsewhere in the business to produce creative assets.

Why doesn't it drive sales directly? Who knows? my guess is the difference in intent between using Facebook and using a search engine; when I use a search engine I'm looking for something, it's an active process with a goal in mind. When I use Facebook I'm consuming content, be it from friends or pages I follow, it's passive. I don't visit Facebook to shop, in much the same way as I don't go to the pub to buy shoes.

Facebook is a place to hang out with friends, like a park or something, I react to being sold to on Facebook in the same way as I would to someone trying to sell me junk I don't want in a park. I think the crux of it is the word social; it's social media, not commercial media.

So why do businesses keep spooging money at social media? In some cases it's because they are big companies with a big budget put aside for branding, they don't expect it to drive sales and that's fine.
But many small companies misunderstand the role of social media and mistakenly expect it to make sales as this post over on SEOmoz highlights.

Another reason businesses prioritise social media is that it's much easier to understand than SEO or PPC. Now I don't want this to come across as flippant, but I am so it will - sharing LOLcats pictures is quite a lot easier than learning the technical aspects of SEO or managing PPC campaigns effectively.

I'm not saying that social media doesn't have it's place, but that place is not driving sales to ecommerce sites. Branding? Sure, knock yourself out, but if you think Facebook is going to deliver bus loads of paying customers to your site you'll be disappointed.