SocialGlow

SocialGlow is a community platform that also offers online course features to its users.

The platform has been around for a few years and has been growing into the online platform space.

The main target audience for SocialGlow are people wanting to offer a special community experience to their audience and integrate online courses into it.

All of this means that the platform has focused on a very specific set of features to deliver on their promise.

Let’s take a look at the highlights of the tools the platform offers:

We’ll now break down what these features really look like in the platform and do!

But we’ll also make a note of other potential tools you might need to add to your tech stack alongside SocialGlow.

Community & Gamification

This is what everything else is built around in SociaGlow and the most important feature to talk about.

In the platform, you can create an unlimited number of Groups which are your very own communities where you and your people can share.

You could turn off member posting or require an approval process before anything is published.

Posts can contain media (natively hosted on SocialGlow): images, video, GIF, attachments,etc.

These can then be commented on, liked (“glows”) replied to or added as Favorite to easily find later.

You can also tag each of these posts to a specific Topic which will help users to navigate your community to find what they’re looking for.

Posts can be Media-based, Product or Live video:

Note that the Live video option is not a native feature and you’ll need to add a YouTube, Zoom or another platform’s live link for this to work.

Each of these interaction could help members get points, which are then tallied in the leaderboard to help you gamify the experience:

You will have control over the name of the different “levels” members can reach in the community and how much each interaction (course completion, likes, post, comment.etc.) is worth.

On the front-end, the community looks simple but attractive, but you’ll unfortunately have little say over the layout and design:

That being said, everything is very intuitive and well integrated together with the Courses and Leaderboard tabs at the top and other helpful links in the sidebar.

Another way for people to interact within the platform is with the private messaging system, which works very much like Facebook Messenger.

The last thing to mention about the community feature is the different ways to plan your posts.

You can program a single post to be published now or at a later date.

But you can also use and re-use Templates which can be a series of post that will be scheduled at a set interval of time:

These can be incredibly useful if you’re running monthly challenges for instance and could save time recreating the same post!

Or if you’re running multiple groups that are just different cohorts of the same program.

This is a very cool tool that not many online community platforms offer.

All of these can be easily edited and scheduled in your Post Library afterwards.

Online Course & Payments

Probably the second most popular feature in SocialGlow is the native online course builder that’s directly integrated with your Group.

This is an easy way to create a self-paced curriculum with videos, downloadable and anything else you’d like:

Note that this is only available on the Plus plan onward (with 1TB of storage).

The curriculum builder is fairly straightforward and simple to follow, simply add you Chapters and Lessons.

You can add a Description, a Transcript as well as Resources to download and handy Action Items members can mark as checked:

In terms of delivery, you have a few options for each module:

Prerequisite: make a previous module compulsory before this one is available.
Drip: set modules to be released based on a specific date or a number of days after the student’s enrollment.
Show Course to specific members: you can create a course only available to a select few in your community.

Here again however, you won’t have much control over the layout and design of your courses in the front-end.

Another few things each Lesson has for your students are a comment section (“Discussion”) and a Notebook to save some notes they can come back to.

To invite students into your Group and Courses you can either do so manually by sharing a link or put it behind a paywall.

By connecting your Stripe account to SocialGlow, you’ll be able to create a checkout in the platform:

You can set up a one-time payment or subscription (no split payment options).

Checkouts cannot be modified beyond just adding a description text.

Other Features

Beyond these core features were reviewed, SocialGlow has other important tools to highlight:

Mobile App: You and your members can access your Groups from their phone and keep up to date while on-the-go. The app comes at no additional cost and is available on both iOS and Google Store.

SMS & Push Notifications: You can buy credits to use the SMS marketing capabilities SocialGlow offers. Email notifications will be sent as reminders to members for the Events in your Community.

Content Calendar: This is a nifty tool in the backend of the platform to take a look at your posting and content calendar at a glance and see what’s planned.

What other tools could I need?

After everything we’ve been, you might be wondering if SocialGlow can be a one stop shop for your online presence. But here are a couple of tools you might need to consider adding to your tech stack:

Email Marketing: SocialGlow does not provide an email marketing feature with automation and an email list. You can however easily integrate with other platforms (ConvertKit natively, or through Zapier).

Website & Funnel Building: There are no page builder features on SocialGlow. Which you’ll probably need to promote and sell your community and courses.

The SocialGlow platform is well-designed and easy to use even if you’ve never used such tools before.

There is an easy Switch button for you to go from the admin dashboard to the members area:

A few tools within the platforms can take a little while to wrap your head around - like the Post Templates for instance.

But the UX is fairly intuitive overall.

One downside that we’ve mentioned a few times in this review already is the lack of customization and branding for most of the platform.

If you’re on the higher plan (Premium) you do have the ability to Whitelabel and change the branding a bit more:

But even then this remains a bit limited and you won’t be able for instance to use a custom domain.

This may change in the future but is something to consider when starting on the platform.

There are a few things to consider before understanding how the pricing of SocialGlow compares to other solutions.

But let’s first lay it out as it is: the platform has a generous 30 days free trial before starting on one of the following plans:

Annual billing will save you 20%.

It’s actually pretty straightforward to know which plan you’ll need.

If you’re only looking to use the Community part of the platform and are not interested in selling Courses, then the Basic plan will do.

If you need both but are not too fussed about branding the platform at this point, the Plus plan will do.

Otherwise go with the Premium plan.

Overall SocialGlow is fairly priced in comparison to other popular platforms like Skool or Mighty Networks for instance.

SocialGlow is a relatively new platform in the industry and has a growing following.

There are a few ways to get support as you get started.

1. There is a Help Articles bank to find answers to the most common questions
2. You can contact the support team using the live chat within the platform
3. You can send an email directly to support@socialglow.com

Unfortunately there aren’t any communities or private groups you can join to meet other SocialGlow users yet but keep an eye out!