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Edited the above re: clarifying rel=canonical advice

What I'd recommend (both as a long term SEO and someone who's used Moz for years), is first book an onboarding session with Moz. I've been using the Moz suite for many years, but recently booked one, just out of curiosity really! (and to see if I had any knowledge gaps with regards what the Moz tools can do). Don't expect strategy advice from Moz, of course, but sitting through a short onboarding session will really help you get to grips with the Moz tools and: Mean you need to pay a consultant for less time training on Moz's tools (so your money can be directed more to strategy & advice, rather than learning the tools) As you'll be a bit more comfortable with the Moz tools, you'll likely understand what the consultant you hire is talking about better Without meaning to be rude to anyone, you'll also find it easier to spot those who can and cannot help you. I'm not pitching for the work or anything here btw (am booked out solid with project work for the next few months, so couldn't even if I wanted to!), I just though the above might be a good way forward for you.

I believe social influences SEO, but even if it doesn't right this minute, will it? Do you anticipate changes to the way people search for businesses like yours? I believe that Facebook is working on grabbing some search share from Google. As that happens, that social investment will pay off even if it's not paying off now.  Already I can use Facebook to search for something like Hotels in NYC and get true personalized results - I'll see the names of my friends who like those pages. Knowing my friends, it will let me know which hotel is swanky, which one is cheap, depending on which of my friends liked it.

If there are redirects on your site from http to https, I believe the best practice is to actually leave your old sitemap in place in the http property, as well as submitting the new ssl sitemap to that property. We learned this AFTER recently moving from http to https and most of our URL structure changing as well. However, with 301s set up for as many site URLs as possible, we saw the new ones gain in indexation and rank rather quickly, even without the old http sitemap.

If you treat it like an EMD, then yeah. There's an advantage much like .com EMDs. I've seen gtlds rank better than .coms. Besides that, it's fair game and will depend on your SEO.

In the short-term, even using 301 redirects may have a slight negative effect on the weight of your links, but in the long-term, they shouldn't be affected by it really.