Has anyone ever tried to monetize social media?

Facebook and Twitter may work for light products like make up. Also, they work for businesses that are well established to deliver announcements and keep face. If you have serious topic they don’t want to know as these sites are social sites, not business. Even you don’t plan to make money through them you should still have presence on them. You can create pages for your business and keep the name. You never know an opportunity may come up at a later stage.

Yes it can be very easily profitably done. Go to relevant pages, extract UIDs, target them. Profit.