Social Media Examiner

Social Media Examiner is an online marketing publisher based in San Diego, California. New articles appear every day on social media strategy, content marketing, and the practical use of AI, written for small businesses that handle their own promotion. The daily articles are only the base layer. Stacked above them are two weekly podcasts, a YouTube channel with new original video each week, annual research reports, a paid membership community, and a long-running in-person conference in Anaheim.

Start with the free side. An email newsletter goes out that Social Media Examiner describes as read by more than 327,000 marketers; the figure is self-reported, so weigh it accordingly, but even a fraction of that would be a serious readership. The YouTube channel adds original video every week, and a clean, working RSS feed still serves anyone who reads through a feed reader rather than a browser tab.

Nearly everything Social Media Examiner publishes is fronted by founder Michael Stelzner, who hosts both podcasts and founded and still runs the paid membership. Beyond the site itself, the company keeps profiles on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube, so the output is easy to follow wherever a reader already spends time.

One oddity deserves a flag. The business behind the site is a California corporation with a street address and a phone number on record, yet Social Media Examiner surfaces neither on its about page nor on its contact page; both sit in the fine print of the terms of use. A determined reader can reach a human, but the route is buried, and for an operation of this size that is a strange choice. It dents transparency a little without touching the quality of the material itself.

Podcasts, reports, and the paid tier

Everything Social Media Examiner produces sorts into a free pile and a paid pile, and the free pile does the recruiting. Daily articles, the weekly shows, the free newsletter, and the recurring research each point, sooner or later, toward the membership or the conference: a funnel, plainly, but one stocked with substantial material along the way, which is the version of the model a reader can live with.

How much rests on one person is worth noticing. Stelzner hosts the flagship show with Jerry Potter, hosts the AI show on his own, and leads the membership community he founded. Two shows every week on top of the Examiner's daily articles is already a demanding schedule to sustain. That much concentration is a real dependence. It also keeps the point of view consistent, whether the format is a blog post or a conference keynote, and consistency over years counts for something in marketing education.

Two weekly podcasts

The Social Media Marketing Podcast is the flagship: weekly, about 45 minutes an episode, hosted by Stelzner together with Jerry Potter, and focused on strategy across the social platforms. AI Explored is the companion show, also weekly, hosted by Stelzner alone, and built around practical AI use for working marketers. Forty-five minutes an episode is long enough to get past headlines and short enough for a commute.

Both live in a shows section on the site, so sampling an episode before subscribing costs nothing but the listening time.

Annual industry reports

Original research is the quiet strength of the catalog. Social Media Examiner publishes an annual Social Media Marketing Industry Report and an AI Marketing Industry Report alongside it, with current editions of both live on the site. Recurring research gives the articles and the podcasts something concrete to build on, and it gives a skeptical first-time visitor a way to judge the operation on data before trusting its advice. For that visitor, the reports are also the fastest way to size up how the company thinks without spending hours in the podcast archive first.

The AI Business Society membership

The AI Business Society is the paid membership, founded and hosted by Stelzner. Members get a weekly curated rundown of AI tools, monthly expert-led live trainings that arrive with resource kits, and live question and answer sessions, though the live format means the value assumes a member shows up in real time; someone who never attends is mostly paying for the weekly tool digest. Set beside the AI podcast and the AI research report, the membership completes a pattern: the Social Media Examiner catalog has tilted hard toward AI, and the paid tier is where that tilt gets monetized.

The Social Media Marketing World conference

The largest production is Social Media Marketing World, a three-day in-person conference in Anaheim, California that covers organic social, paid social, and AI marketing and has reached its fourteenth year. A physical event does not get to a fourteenth edition without a paying audience that keeps returning, and that track record is the strongest credibility signal Social Media Examiner can point to.

Inside the main event sits AI Business World, a two-day conference within the conference, focused entirely on AI marketing, with roughly twenty hands-on training sessions and two keynotes. Social Media Examiner also sells sponsorship packages around its conferences and content. Sponsorship is standard in this category, but it belongs in the back of the mind whenever coverage touches a sponsor's product.

The outside review trail is short. Trustpilot shows only two reviews of Social Media Examiner, both reportedly positive. Glassdoor lists six employee reviews, and no Better Business Bureau profile for the company turned up at all. Two reviews and six employee write-ups settle nothing in either direction; readers rarely rate the sites they read the way they rate a hotel or a plumber, so crowd opinion counts for little in a judgement here regardless.

The evidence splits into two kinds: a formal reputation record that is nearly empty, and an operational record showing a conference that has run for well over a decade, a claimed newsletter readership in the hundreds of thousands, and a publishing pace that must be fed daily to exist at all. Reading through it all, I kept returning to that second kind, and it convinced me more than any star rating would have. The verdict lands positive, with two honest asterisks attached: contact details tucked away in the terms of use, and a review sample too small to check the company against.

What remains is a personal call, not a rating: the free material asks for nothing except attention, and there is a great deal of it, while the paid programs ask for real money and, in the case of the conference, a trip to Anaheim. Social Media Examiner publishes the bulk of its work in the open, and that published record, not a star count, is what this review has weighed.

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