It's been a long time since I thought about any of this, but last time I did, social media traffic was some of the worst quality. Search traffic was seen as golden because it came with intent. Social media traffic was wandering and aimless, so converted poorly even if it was 1000x search. Search still got more conversions and it was no contest. Did something change?
Commercially I agree with you, search traffic is much better than social media traffic.
But people are reaching huge audiences through social media without even having any domain that can be indexed by Google. That is also the world wide web.
We made this site for people who search. We were those people, searching Google for where to watch cars racing on the Nürburgring and then getting nothing but cryptic route descriptions on forums.
So we created a map with actual walking routes and people were finding them. Now they're not finding them and they're back to lots of searching.
We get some traction on social media too. But it's people who already go there and know a lot of what we provide already. People don't search Instagram for walking routes to POIs.
They really don't. People reach enormous audiences thorough social media.