October 10, 2026
September 30, 2026
September 28, 2026
September 23, 2026
This interview is with Eric Elkins, CEO and Chief Strategist, WideFoc.us Social Media.
As CEO and Chief Strategist at WideFoc.us Social Media, how do you introduce your focus and the kinds of brands you help to someone meeting you for the first time?
WideFoc.us is a social media agency I founded in 2007. We’ve been helping brands grow through organic and paid social media, along with influencer marketing, for more than 18 years.
Whether they’re B2B or B2C, the brands we partner with tend to resemble one another in a few ways. They have a fairly healthy marketing budget and either have a marketing team in place or someone managing all of those spinning plates on their own. They’re past the point of wanting social to just build awareness and understand it can drive revenue, but they may not be getting there on their own.
Our sweet spots are:
In these areas, social can move pipeline, leads, and dollars when someone who’s been doing this for nearly two decades is running the strategy.
Not that I’m in elevators much anymore, but the pitch is this: social media is a revenue driver if you build a full-funnel approach. In 2026, it’s also an authoritative source for the AI tools that B2B decision-makers and consumers use to find solutions to their needs. So if your social channels are thin, you’re invisible in ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews, you’re not engaging with your audiences, and you’re likely not getting any measurable ROI.
What pivotal experiences most shaped your path to leading strategy in social media marketing?
Early in my career, I was a corporate trainer — and then an elementary school teacher for a few years. Both jobs are about figuring out what your audience needs, meeting them where they are, and earning their attention before you earn their trust. (Sound familiar?)
From there I landed at The Denver Post as Youth Content Editor, managing a team of 100 kid reporters. That was the moment the lightbulb came on around user-generated content. Those kids were reaching audiences the paper’s staff writers couldn’t — they were authentic, they were peers, and they were already embedded in the communities we were trying to reach. I was watching a preview of what social media would be a decade before the term meant anything.
That insight pushed me to co-found Bias Media, powered by Scripps Howard and Media News Group — a multi-platform social media engine when “social network” still meant your rec softball team. From there I moved into a new media practices role at a PR firm, which led to helping launch a mobile commerce startup. Those were two more experiences of building inside categories nobody had finished defining yet.
In 2007, I founded WideFoc.us. Most marketers couldn’t give you a definition of social media at the time, but they knew their companies needed it. That gap is the whole reason my business exists, and the timing was optimal because the economic downturn meant that companies needed specialized help but couldn’t increase their headcount.
After that, a few pivots shaped how I actually run the place:
My first hires taught me a brutal lesson — hire before you need the help, not after you’re already underwater.
COVID shaped the team I have today. When things went sideways, I made a call to prioritize keeping people fed over keeping the business maximally profitable, and we have a team with real longevity and trust because of it.
And the most recent one is shaping strategy right now. One of our SEO partners sat down with a mutual client and said, in plain terms, “The reason you’re showing up in AI search is the social content and blog posts WideFoc.us has been publishing for years.” That was the moment AI stopped being a theory for us and became the thing we’re actively building around. Social content isn’t just feeding your audience anymore — it’s feeding the AI tools your audience uses to find you.
With that background, what feels distinctive about building social media strategies for Denver audiences?
WideFoc.us is headquartered in Denver and always has been, but we work with clients across North America and have from the beginning (our first major client was Sears Holdings in Chicago).
But Denver is my home base. We love working with local brands, and being here does teach some useful habits. It’s a market where cutting-edge tech and SaaS companies sit next to home services operators, manufacturers, and real estate education brands — all in the same time zone. You can’t assume what an audience looks like based on where they live, because the person on the next barstool could be a software engineer at a seed-stage startup or a third-generation homebuilder. So we always build strategies around behaviors, interests, and buying signals — sometimes with a distinct geo focus.
Being based in Denver has been a quiet competitive advantage. We’re close enough to big-brand work to stay sharp, and far enough from the coastal marketing echo chamber that we don’t get pulled into the latest drama. We have team members in multiple time zones, so we can be just about anywhere in the US within a few hours, and still have the best climate (and some of the best restaurants) in the country. (Not to mention that it’s easy to get first tracks at Keystone and still be home in time for a noon meeting.)
Drawing from your HVAC and multifamily work, what is one repeatable social tactic that reliably converts local interest into booked calls or tours?
The most reliable play we run for both verticals is a trust-and-trigger stack — it works because neither layer does the job alone.
The first layer is GEO-optimized organic content that builds local trust. For an HVAC brand, that’s short-form video of techs explaining why a furnace is short-cycling, what a SEER rating really means, or how to spot a refrigerant leak — interleaved with promotional posts like seasonal tune-up specials and financing offers. For a master-planned community, it’s day-in-the-life content, neighborhood walk-throughs, and nearby amenities — tied to the community name and surrounding ZIP codes, with current move-in specials woven in. Both are scroll-stopping because they’re useful and human-focused. We write and tag them for how people search, so when someone in Aurora types “best HVAC company near me” into ChatGPT or a Google AI Overview, that content is part of the answer.
The second layer is paid campaigns built for action, not awareness. Click-to-call ads for a windows and siding company or HVAC service — especially during heat waves, cold snaps, and tune-up season — let a scroller go from Reel to ringing dispatch in a single tap. For homebuilders, it’s Meta lead ads with pre-filled forms and “book a tour” CTAs, geofenced around where buyers tend to come from. Same audiences as the organic layer, same neighborhoods — now with a trigger for qualified conversions.
The organic layer teaches your audience who you are and why to trust you before they’re even in-market. The paid layer catches them the moment they’re ready to book an appointment or a tour — and it lands on someone who already recognizes the brand from their feed. CTRs go up, cost-per-call drops, and the sales team gets warmer leads than any cold PPC buy will deliver. We’ve used exactly this stack to produce a 9x lead lift for a home services client.
Same playbook, different vertical inputs, and clear attribution to social media channels!
Here’s a resource we created on this subject: https://bit.ly/4soUrvh
As AI shapes discovery, what is one practical step marketers can take this month to improve Generative Engine Optimization and surface in AI-driven summaries?
Pick the ten questions your buyers ask most—the ones your sales team hears on every call or the ones you put in your FAQ—and publish one plain-language answer per question this month on your blog, as a LinkedIn article and a post, and on your other primary social channels.
AI models pull from question-shaped content that reads like a direct answer. If your site and feeds are full of brand copy and campaign polish but light on well-organized answers, you’re giving the models nothing to cite. Answer the questions in your brand voice, and tag them with the language your buyers use—not the jargon your industry uses internally.
Then build ongoing content posts from those pillars. Your content will start showing up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview responses as you become more consistent.
Here’s a blog post about it: https://www.widefoc.us/post/we-re-all-in-on-ai-seo
To turn that consistency into pipeline, what’s your starting point for aligning organic content with paid social to drive qualified leads?
The starting point is a conversation, not a campaign.
Before we touch ad accounts or content calendars, we sit down with the client and get a clear idea of whom they’re trying to reach and what they want them to do. We need to know what “qualified” means — and what behaviors count as revenue-generating. Without those definitions, we can build audiences and drive traffic all day, but revenue won’t improve.
Once we have the qualified profile, we build our content pillars and paid social audiences.
Audit the organic content already earning saves, shares, and thoughtful comments from people who match the profile. That’s the highest-intent signal. Those posts become the foundation for paid creative, because content that earns engagement organically outperforms a purpose-built ad.
Layer in paid to do three jobs that organic can’t. First, extend reach into lookalike audiences that match the qualified profile. Second, target the warm audience already engaging with organic — a pool that knows the brand — with scroll-stopping creative for likes, comments, and shares. Third, run paid conversion campaigns that pick up the narrative from the middle of the funnel.
Measure, optimize, build on what we learned, and improve the messaging and targeting.
But the starting point is shared definitions, aligned audiences, and clear attribution.
When a client asks you to tie social to revenue, which metric do you prioritize and why?
Custom UTMs — or, more precisely, the conversions you can trace through them.
Every link back to the website from social (posts, ads, even the link in bio) is tagged with parameters that tell us where a click, a session, a form fill, or a sale originated. Without UTM discipline, social attribution is a guessing game. With it, we can show the client which Reel drove the most e-commerce conversions, which LinkedIn post sourced the lead, and which paid creative generated a purchase.
Engagement metrics tell you what content resonated, while reach tells you how many people saw it. Impressions tell you how well the algorithm worked, but none of those answer the question the CFO is asking about your social media budget. Revenue-attributed traffic does — it’s the one number that connects a post to a purchase.
The one catch is that GA4 needs to be set up to track incoming traffic and capture conversion activity.
We’ve created a specific nomenclature we use with every client so that attribution from social to revenue is clear and defensible.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
If you’re measuring social solely by likes, followers, and impressions, you’re not building a full-funnel strategy. Social is the front door to discovery: your audience finds you on LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Threads. AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google index your social content and decide whether to recommend it to your audiences, but it’s more than that. The brands that treat social both as a revenue driver and as an AI input are going to own the next five years. That means you need a consistent and strategic organic content strategy and paid campaigns designed to convert.
After 18 years building WideFoc.us, I still think of this work as teaching — meeting your audience where they are and earning their attention before you earn their business. The platforms have changed, but the premise hasn’t. Reach out if you’re ready to drive sales through social.
Connecting Experts with Publishers
Connectively connects subject-matter experts with top publishers to increase their exposure and create quality, ready-to-publish Q & A content.
About Connectively →