The 12 Best Social Pros Podcast Episodes of All Time

Every week, the Social Pros Podcast serves up insights from real professionals doing real work in social media. Host Jay Baer and his guests dig deep into the inside stories and behind-the-scenes social media secrets at companies like Ford, ESPN, and many more. As Social Pros approaches its second birthday, we revisited some of Social Pros’ best conversations to bring you this list of the 12 most popular episodes since 2015—the best of the best.

12. How Buffer Does Social Media and Why Less Is More

Brian Peters, Digital Marketing Strategist for Buffer, reveals what Buffer’s arsenal of tools and data have taught him about the surprisingly promising future of organic content. This episode serves up fascinating insights into how transparency leads to content gold and why increasing engagement means posting less on social.

11. Which People Skills Are Most Important in Social Media?

Dave Kerpen, CEO of Likeable Local, teaches us how proper listening can make you a better person, partner, and social pro. As Kerpen explains, even the most well thought-out and perfectly executed social plan can fall flat if it loses sight of the essential humanity of its audience. Listen in to learn the crucial difference between “being interested” and “being interesting,” plus two simple questions that lead to deeper relationships.

10. When and How Does Snapchat Work for Business?

Carlos Gil, Head of Global Social Media Marketing for BMC Software, defends Snapchat as a social tool for B2B and B2C businesses. Carlos knows a thing or two about raising brand awareness and driving global demand through social media, and his perspective on Snapchat is not to be missed.

9. How to Use Social Media to Delight Customers Across 11 Brands

With a global portfolio of eleven brands that encompasses 638 properties in 52 countries, social and customer engagement can be both tricky and overwhelming for Hyatt. Luckily, they’ve got Dan Moriarty, Director of Digital Strategy and Activation. In this episode, he shares his approach to managing a global brand’s social across different platforms, experimenting with new channels, and breeding internal advocacy through employee empowerment.

8. Why Social Media Customer Service Is the New Marketing

80 percent of businesses think they are delivering great customer service, but only eight percent of those customers agree. In this episode, our own Jay Baer digs into this staggering statistic, with help from research featured in Hug Your Haters. You don’t want to miss this one.

7. How to Sell on Social When You’re Not Trying to Sell

Richard Margetic, Former Director of Global Business at Intuit, discusses social media’s role at different stages of the sales funnel and throughout every department of an organization. Listen in for insights on transparency, teachable moments from Google’s failures in social media, dealing with negative reviews, and humanity’s need to be social.

6. How to Use Influencers to Amplify Social Media

Influencers are causing a marketing paradigm shift, and Heidi Sullivan and Todd Cameron can prove it. Heidi, Senior VP at Cision, and Todd, Head of Content and Strategy at TapInfluence, tease their Influence Pros Podcast and share their ever-evolving 50,000-foot view on influencer marketing.

5. Be More Productive in Social Than You Ever Thought Possible

David Horsager, business strategist and best-selling author of The Trust Edge, provides concrete steps to increase productivity and deepen relationships while maintaining peak creativity. His go-to tips for decluttering your professional life will help you get back to focusing on what you love about your job: creating and expanding relationships through creative social engagement.

4. The New Rules of Social Marketing and PR

David Meerman Scott, Marketing and Sales Strategist for Freshspot Marketing, chats with Jay about the latest edition of his bestselling book, The New Rules of Social Marketing and PR, newsjacking, and the unification of sales and PR/marketing. You’ll hear this internationally acclaimed strategist’s take on everything from collaborative networking to the dangers of overzealous influencer marketing.

3. How to Use Content to Build Your Online Influence

John Hall, author and CEO of Influence & Co., pulls back the curtain on creating ambassadors and influencing people through content and social. In this episode, you’ll hear John’s expert advice on scaling influence, gaining trust, staying top-of-mind, and when to prioritize vulnerability over profits.

2. Podcasts and Facebook Are the New Community Levers

Coming in at number two is this must-listen episode with Jason Keath, Founder and CEO of Social Fresh. Jason dives deep into the low-tech ways social media experts are finding success, share his insights on the untapped potential of social media ads, and reveals why Facebook groups and podcasts are leading the charge in building tight-knit online communities.

1. Gary Vaynerchuk and the Currency of Attention

The most popular Social Pros episode of all time stars none other than Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia and legendary business-builder. In this episode, Gary talks to Jay about his approach to social media “land-grabbing,” his long game, building your brand in spaces you don’t own or control, and why you can never have too much attention.

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3 Successful Ways to Promote Your Business on Social Media

Looking for new ways to put your brand in front of social media users? Wondering what’s working for others? It’s possible to keep your social posts focused on your brand and avoid seeming self-centered and overly promotional. In this article, you’ll discover three ways to talk about your brand on social more often without turning

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How to Use Facebook Ads to Enhance Direct Mail Campaigns

Do you want to reach people based on their physical addresses? Have you considered combining Facebook ads with direct mail? In this article, you’ll discover how to create a multichannel marketing campaign using Facebook ads and direct mail. #1: Prepare Your Mailing Data for Upload Into Facebook If you use direct mail, your mailing data

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Instagram Stories for Desktop and Facebook Watch Explored

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a news show for marketers who want to stay on the leading edge of social media. On this week’s Social Media Marketing Talk Show with Michael Stelzner, we explore Facebook Watch, Instagram Stories for the desktop and Instagram Galleries updates with Sue B.

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How to Diagnose Pages that Rank in One Geography But Not Another - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Are you ranking pretty well in one locale, only to find out your rankings tank in another? It's not uncommon, even for sites without an intent to capture local queries. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand shows you how to diagnose the issue with a few clever SEO tricks, then identify the right strategy to get back on top.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to this edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about rankings that differ from geography to geography. Many of you might see that you are ranking particularly well in one city, but when you perform that search in another city or in another country perhaps, that still speaks the same language and has very similar traits, that maybe you're not performing well.

Maybe you do well in Canada, but you don't do well in the United States. Maybe you do well in Portland, Oregon, but you do poorly in San Diego, California. Sometimes you might be thinking to yourself, "Well, wait, this search is not particularly local, or at least I didn't think of it as being particularly local. Why am I ranking in one and not the other?" So here's a process that you can use to diagnose.

Confirm the rankings you see are accurate:The first thing we need to do is confirm that the rankings you see or that you've heard about are accurate. This is actually much more difficult than it used to be. It used to be you could scroll to the bottom of Google and change your location to whatever you wanted. Now Google will geolocate you by your IP address or by a precise location on your mobile device, and unfortunately you can't just specify one particular location or another — unless you know some of these SEO hacks.

A. Google's AdPreview Tool - Google has an ad preview tool, where you can specify and set a particular location. That's at AdWords.Google.com slash a bunch of junk slash ad preview. We'll make sure that the link is down in the notes below.

B. The ampersand-near-equals parameter (&near=) - Now, some SEOs have said that this is not perfect, and I agree it is imperfect, but it is pretty close. We've done some comparisons here at Moz. I've done them while I'm traveling. It's not bad. Occasionally, you'll see one or two things that are not the same. The advertisements are frequently not the same. In fact, they don't seem to work well. But the organic results look pretty darn close. The maps results look pretty darn close. So I think it's a reasonable tool that you can use.

That is by basically changing the Google search query — so this is the URL in the search query — from Google.com/search?q= and then you might have ice+cream or WordPress+web+design, and then you use this, &near= and the city and state here in the United States or city and province in Canada or city and region in another country. In this case, I'm going with Portland+OR. This will change my results. You can give this a try yourself. You can see that you will see the ice cream places that are in Portland, Oregon, when you perform this search query.

For countries, you can use another one. You can either go directly to the country code Google, so for the UK Google.co.uk, or for New Zealand Google.co.nz, or for Canada Google.ca. Then you can type that in.You can also use this parameter &GL= instead of &near. This is global location equals the country code, and then you could put in CA for Canada or UK for the UK or NZ for New Zealand.

C. The Mozbar's search profiles - You can also do this with the MozBar. The MozBar kind of hacks the near parameter for you, and you can just specify a location and create a search profile. Do that right inside the MozBar. That's one of the very nice things about using it.

D. Rank tracking with a platform that supports location-specific rankings - Some of them don't, some of them do. Moz does right now. I believe Searchmetrics does if you use the enterprise. Oh, I'm trying to remember if Rob Bucci said STAT does. Well, Rob will answer in the comments, and he'll tell us whether STAT does. I think that they do.

Look at who IS ranking and what features they may have:

So next, once you've figured out whether this ranking anomaly that you perceive is real or not, you can step two look at who is ranking in the one where you're not and figure out what factors they might have going for them.

• Have they gotten a lot of local links, location-specific links from these websites that are in that specific geography or serve that geography, local chambers of commerce, local directories, those kinds of things?
• Do they have a more hyper-local service area? On a map, if this is the city, do they serve that specific region? You serve a broad set of locations all over the place, and maybe you don't have a geo-specific region that you're serving.
• Do they have localized listings, listings in places like where Moz Local or a competitor like Yext or Whitespark might push all their data to? Those could be things like Google Maps and Bing Maps, directories, local data aggregators, Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc., etc.
• Do they have rankings in Google Maps? If you go and look and you see that this website is ranking particularly well in Google Maps for that particular region and you are not, that might be another signal that hyper-local intent and hyper-local ranking signals, ranking algorithm is in play there.
• Are they running local AdWords ads? I know this might seem like, "Wait a minute. Rand, I thought ads were not directly connected to organic search results." They're not, but it tends to be the case that if you bid on AdWords, you tend to increase your organic click-through rate as well, because people see your ad up at the top, and then they see you again a second time, and so they're a little more biased to click. Therefore, buying local ads can sometimes increase organic click-through rate as well. It can also brand people with your particular business. So that is one thing that might make a difference here.

Consider location-based searcher behaviors:

Now we're not considering who is ranking, but we're considering who is doing the searching, these location-based searchers and what their behavior is like.

• Are they less likely to search for your brand because you're not as well known in that region?
• Are they less likely to click your site in the SERPs because you're not as well known?
• Is their intent somehow different because of their geography? Maybe there's a language issue or a regionalism of some kind. This could be a local language thing even here in the United States, where parts of the country say "soda" and parts of the country say "pop." Maybe those mean two different things, and "pop" means, "Oh, it's a popcorn store in Seattle," because there's the Pop brand, but in the Midwest, "pop" clearly refers to types of soda beverages.
• Are they more or less sensitive to a co-located solution? So it could be that in many geographies, a lot of your market doesn't care about whether the solution that they're getting is from their local region, and in others it does. A classic one on a country level is France, whose searchers tend to care tremendously more that they are getting .fr results and that the location of the business they are clicking on is in France versus other folks in Europe who might click a .com or a .co.uk with no problem.

Divide into three buckets:

You're going to divide the search queries that you care about that have these challenges into three different types of buckets:

Bucket one: Hyper-geo-sensitive

This would be sort of the classic geo-specific search, where you see maps results right up at the top. The SERPs change completely from geo to geo. So if you perform the search in Portland and then you perform it in San Diego, you see very, very different results. Seven to nine of the top ten at least are changing up, and it's the case that almost no non-local listings are showing in the top five results. When you see these, this is probably non-targetable without a physical location in that geography. So if you don't have a physical location, you're kind of out of business until you get there. If you do, then you can work on the local ranking signals that might be holding you back.

Bucket two: Semi-geo-sensitive

I've actually illustrated this one over here, because this can be a little bit challenging to describe. But basically, you're getting a mix of geo-specific and global results. So, for example, I use the &near=Portland, Oregon, because I'm in Seattle and I want to see Portland's results for WordPress web design.

WordPress web design, when I do the search all over the United States, the first one or two results are pretty much always the same. They're always this Web Savvy Marketing link and this Creative Bloq, and they're very broad. They are not specifically about a local provider of WordPress web design.

But then you get to number three and four and five, and the results change to be local-specific businesses. So in Portland, it's these Mozak Design guys. Mozak, no relation to Moz, to my knowledge anyway. In San Diego, it's Kristin Falkner, who's ranking number three, and then other local San Diego WordPress web design businesses at four and five. So it's kind of this mix of geo and non-geo. You can generally tell this by looking and changing your geography in this fashion seeing those different things.

Some of the top search results usually will be like this, and they'll stay consistent from geography to geography. In these cases, what you want to do is work on boosting those local-specific signals. So if you are ranking number five or six and you want to be number three, go for that, or you can try and be in the global results, in which case you're trying to boost the classic ranking signals, not the local ones so you can get up there.

Bucket three: Non-geo-sensitive

Those would be, "I do this search, and I don't see any local-specific results." It's just a bunch of nationwide or worldwide brands. There are no maps, usually only one, maybe two geo-specific results in the top 10, and they tend to be further down, and the SERPs barely change from geo to geo. They're pretty much the same throughout the country.

So once you put these into these three buckets, then you know which thing to do. Here, it's pursue classic signals. You probably don't need much of a local boost.

Here, you have the option of going one way or the other, boosting local signals to get into these rankings or boosting the classic signals to get into those global ones.

Here you're going to need the physical business.

All right, everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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3 Simple Ways to Protect Your Content on Social Media

Do you own your ideas?

If you strive to position yourself as a thought leader in your field, this question may inspire anxiety. Because your professional success is judged by your ability to cultivate original ground-breaking content, the fear that you will lose ownership of those ideas is very real.

Think of that time you were in a brainstorming meeting, and your coworker spouted off an idea you shared with him in confidence, as if it were his own. Unfortunately, it never goes over well to interrupt your team’s enthusiastic responses to announce, “Um, that was actually my idea.”

We’ve all felt this: If no one knows that you are the source of revolutionary ideas in your company, how can you prove your value to your team and employer?

Brands face the same issue, every day—especially brands whose bread and butter is content surrounding thought leadership. As social media has enabled the wide sharing of ideas by way of articles, photos, and videos, the question of who owns what ideas is only intensifying.

In the social media era, the question of who owns what ideas is only intensifying.
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Facebook Rolls Out New Protection Tools

In 2017, Pew reported that, through social media, readers identify the source of their news only 56 percent of the time. That means 44 percent of the time, the thoughtful article you labored over for hours, weeks, maybe months, isn’t being attributed to your brand. Ouch.

The good news is that Facebook is identifying these growing ownership issues and taking action. In an effort to increase insight into news sources and article ownership, Facebook is placing publisher logos next to article links featured through trending and search aggregations.

Publisher logos on articles on trending news

Publisher logos on articles on searched news

Facebook’s update benefits both brands and consumers. In order to rise above the noise of a clickbait-filled environment, credible sources need their branding in the forefront. Additionally, recognizing and engaging with articles from credible sources remains important for, among other reasons, avoiding “fake news.” In other words, the addition of publisher logos is truly a win-win—a step towards more responsible reading, sharing, and creating.

While this update is currently rolling out on trending and search articles, Facebook’s goal is to place publishers’ logos wherever their content appears. Until then, take steps to protect the ownership of your ideas and content by consistently practicing the following branding techniques.

3 Simple Ways to Protect Your Content

1. To be sure your content is closely knitted to your brand, post and share content from your brand’s website. In doing so, if you or your audiences share your content, your brand’s website will appear in the link preview of the post—a non-editable stamp, naming the content forever yours.
2. Place your logo in the featured image of your blog posts. As Facebook updated its rules surrounding edited link preview images, your featured blog images will always appear in the link preview and cannot be edited. This means no matter who shares your content, your logo, if placed on the featured image, will always appear with the link to your content. (If your logo contains letters, be sure to abide by Facebook’s 20 percent text rule.)
3. Stay true to your brand colors and create a reusable treatment to append to your blog posts’ featured images. The image doesn’t have to contain the name and author as we do at Convince & Convert. Instead, consider framing your images or creating a graphic that strongly represents your brand so that, beyond the logo, your images are instantly recognizable.

Finally, if you don’t have time to adjust all your social branding techniques, Facebook has you covered. Marketers itching to jump on the publisher logo bandwagon can use this amazing step-by-step guide provided by the good folks at Facebook.

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How to Generate Revenue With Your Content

Want to make money from your content? Wondering how a loyal audience can create business opportunities? To explore business models that help publishers generate revenue, I interview Joe Pulizzi. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers, business

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