Hailley and Brian of Buffer’s Science of Social Media are serving up sweet morsels of social media news in today’s Listen. From Twitter’s “Promote Mode” to Mark Zuckerberg’s New Year’s resolution to Snapchat’s multi-million dollar NYE party, we’re getting an insider look at what these top tidbits mean for the ever-changing world of social media.

Here’s the scoop, starting with a little reverse engineering on what you shouldn’t be doing on social media:

• (01:05) Biggest social media mistakes
• (01:30) Why most businesses fail to realize that social media is about creating and nurturing relationships
• (01:50) When social media is treated as a “numbers game”, it has no long time viability
• (02:20) What’s better? Reaching 5 highly-engaged people and building relationships with them or 15 semi-interested people that require twice the work to convert?
• (02:40) How to find the balance between the numbers and the relationships
• (02:50) Another big mistake: focusing on the “fun” branding without having a solid brand
• (03:05) What this “fun” branding is and how to focus on who you’re attracting instead  
• (03:30) Ask yourself, what unique thing do you bring to the table?
• (03:45) The special things that make Buffer unique
• (04:15) Mark Zuckerberg’s New Resolutions (spoiler alert: he wants to “fix Facebook”) and how he plans on implementing it  
• (06:35) Twitter’s “Promote Mode”
• (07:45) Buffer’s results when using this new program
• (08:25) Limitations of Promote Mode
• (09:10) Facebook’s latest updates and what they mean for the platform and its users
• (10:10) Snapchat’s huge NYE party and what happened when guests were prohibited to post photos on Snapchat… (Spoiler: they just posted on Instagram instead smh)
• (11:30) Seems like a pretty obvious flub, but a bold move on Spiegel’s part to try and urge his guests to live in the moment and not take photos…

According to today’s Read, binge-watching videos can actually help your marketing efforts. Never woulda guessed that, but you can bet we’ll be trying to convince our boss that binging all 7 seasons of Game of Thrones at work is a smart business decision.

Oh, wait…the videos today’s Read recommends binge-watching are Rand Fishkin’s Whiteboard Fridays. Dang, doesn’t sound like GOT at work will be happening.

Moz’s Whiteboard Fridays are some of our favorite marketing videos, though, and they are totally binge-worthy. Sarah Jones of Introverted Alpha agrees.

Sarah wanted to turbocharge her SEO, but didn’t know where to start. She figured that watching every Whiteboard Friday and putting Rand’s advice into action on her website was a good starting point. She was right.

The result? She more than tripled her website traffic in just 4 months – going from 8k monthly visitors to 30k.

And the good news for us is that she detailed her winning SEO strategy in today’s Read. Her 3 most important steps for your reading pleasure:

1. Sarah decreased the number of blog posts on her site from 107 to 45. You read that right. Sarah actually deleted posts from her blog. She started by making a spreadsheet to see what content was driving organic visits and what wasn’t. From there, she reviewed every post. The ones that were lower quality and had low views were trashed and redirected to more quality pieces.
2. She created new guide-style pages with better interlinking and keywords. Sarah took any quality content that wasn’t being used, was in a weak post, or was too short, and combined them into longer “guide” posts. These new guide-style posts are now drawing more search traffic than anything else. Here’s an example from Sarah’s website.
3. Sarah catered new content toward her top Google search queries. She focused on creating the best content possible for just a handful of keywords, rather than creating content for every keyword she could think of. This idea came from this Whiteboard Friday.

Want the full scoop? Dive into today’s Read.

Volkswagen took the road less traveled in their latest ad, in which kids have grand dreams about their future car… But, they’re not Volkswagens. What kid would actually dream about the dazzle-less Golf?

Instead, kids are rapt by race cars, DeLoreans, Lamborghinis, and Bugattis. One boy is even drawn to a car like a moth to a lamp, carelessly crossing the street, seconds away from serious danger…

That’s where Volkswagen comes in. We see Golf’s driver assistance services in action as the car comes to a halt in front the boy with the tagline, “Keep on dreaming, kids.”

“Many children dream of cars. Not everyone dreams of a Volkswagen. Fortunately, we think of them all when building a Volkswagen.” Reminds us of this poignant ad from Volvo, which also highlights third-party safety, a growing trend in today’s car commercials.