Liking and tweeting. It seems like that’s all social media has boiled down to. For businesses, that could simplify digital marketing and user engagement, offering more direct ways to monetize brand interaction. An upcoming Tweet button from Twitter is the latest step towards this trend.

The official Tweet button is expected to become available sometime this week. It will operate quite similarly to the Facebook Like button, placed across the web as a call to action. A confidential document obtained by Mashable indicates that the Tweet button is aimed at publishers seeking reach, growth and traffic [read: traffic, traffic, and traffic].

Plenty of other social and bookmarking sites have their own traffic-bearing invites to place on a web page, from Google Buzz to Yahoo Buzz. Significant to Twitter, however, is the socialization and enterprise potential around a Tweet button. It’s just another case of Twitter making a feature on its own instead of leaving it to its developer community, but it plays directly to the long-term strategy of the microblogging service.

What the Tweet button does is add another direct link for Twitter to record the actions of its users. Centralizing data around user activity is of increasing importance as Twitter seeks ways to monetize its network. Advertising mechanisms have been put in place, with @earlybird as its own brand-oriented channel, and recent hires in Twitter’s sales department means the company is dedicated to becoming an ad network.

Third party developers will need to eventually seek other ways to utilize Twitter’s datasets for their own monetization purposes, but it’s really the brands and businesses that they should be paying attention to. While Twitter plays catch-up with its own tools, developers can build economies around the resulting targeted data sets.

Centralizing user activity within Twitter’s network is a great start, but including other network data is the future. This will become more evident as users gain confidence in sharing consumer data on networks in exchange for various rewards, creating demand around a cross-network assessment on an individual basis.

The oncoming influence of this type of activity is evident in Amazon and Bay’s use of Facebook Like’s, which have been validating of their digital marketing efforts. Right now, businesses seek more tangible effects of their online labor, feeling out more and more ways to effectively utilize social media trends. As the social networks themselves gather up as much of that consumer activity as possible, the value of social media consumerism will only grow alongside virtualization trends.