How do You Leverage Social Media To Drive Your Community?
Learn how to leverage social media to build and drive your own thriving community. Expert strategies, proven tactics, and actionable tips inside.
In this insightful show, we explore the key strategies for harnessing social media to cultivate and grow your own community. From identifying your target audience to creating engaging content, you’ll learn practical tips to enhance your online presence. Discover how to utilize various platforms effectively to connect with like-minded individuals.
This Week’s Sponsors
Kinta: Kinta
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:00.980] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 143. In this episode, we’re going to talk about how to leverage social media to drive your community. It’s an important subject. It’s really important to have a social media strategy. What is classified as social media? That’s going to be an interesting topic because I think it encapsulates several things that you might not consider to be social media. I have my ever-patient and helpful co-host, Kurt, who knows even more about the topics we discuss than I do. So, Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:00:52.460] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Ahnen I own a company called Manananomas, and we work directly with the great folks over at WP Tonic as well.
[00:01:00.720] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Like I said, this should be a really insightful show. Having a social media strategy is crucial if you want to attract your first batch of students to your membership website course. But before we go into the meat and potatoes of the show, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve also got a special sponsor for the next few weeks, and Kirek will tell you more about this monthly sponsor. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:01:41.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, Jonathan. We’re talking about Misterio LMS. And here’s why we’re excited about those folks at Misterio. They’ve got a free version, and it’s not a trial. It’s not limited. You get unlimited courses, lessons, and students, all for one low price, and that’s forever. No credit card needed. So you can build your entire course business without paying a cent. Now, they’ve got a drag-and-drop editor. The quiz creation feature is available, along with student progress tracking and built-in payment options using PayPal and Stripe. That’s all there is in the free version. However, if you’re looking for certificates, content drip, or other advanced features, they do offer a pro version. However, I honestly think most course creators will be able to launch for free, and you can check them out at Misterioelms. That’s M-A-S-T-E-R-I-Y-O. Com.
[00:02:30.000] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Thanks for that, Kirk. Let’s go straight into it, understanding social media and community. I think the reason we’re emphasizing community, folks, is that I believe the end of 2025 is approaching, and if you want a successful membership, it will have elements of community in it. What those elements would be is up to you. Now, we love a Fluent community. There’s a lot of buzz about SCORM. We discussed those last week, comparing SCORM with the Fluent community. If you hadn’t had the opportunity to listen to that particular episode, I would highly recommend it to you. So, Kirk, I’ve listed… I like to get your general view of what you see as a community with membership. And I’ve about four subcategories of different types of community. Perhaps you could go straight into these four and provide feedback on whether you agree that these are useful subcategories?
[00:03:45.080] – Kurt von Ahnen
If I’m looking at this correctly, we’re talking about professional communities, support communities, internet interest-based communities, and personal brand communities, right?
[00:03:54.600] – Jonathan Denwood
Interest-based, yes.
[00:03:56.720] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. I think what you’ve done is important, and that is to isolate the actual cause or reason for having a community. We talk to a lot of people, Jonathan, you, and I, about those who want to create a membership site, a community site, or something similar, but they just want to have it. They believe it’s a requirement for success in some way, but they lack a clear focus or a defined pathway for what the community is actually about. And so I think it’s cool the way that you’ve broken it down.
[00:04:29.620] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’m just going to put this to you. I think it depends on what you consider a community, because if you’re just starting out with membership, I would advise you to start with a subscription-based membership. And then, after you have your first batch of students, you can consider adding different elements of community to introduce confrontation. You could join Facebook groups, use them in school, or we would advise you to look at Fluent Community. And then that has almost 80% or 70% of what you would probably want. Then there are higher levels, such as Mighty Networks and Circle, which I’ve recently discovered has added a website builder to its functionality. Nice. They’ve just introduced that, or you could also look at Buddy Boss or Fluent Community. There are many options at various levels of building community, aren’t there?
[00:05:41.700] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. Well, and not to steal the spotlight, or make this a commercial for my own things, but our Power Sport Academy project is just now getting to the point where we’re looking at putting community into that package. But it started out as an online training site five years ago, and now it’s had some students roll through it, and it’s got a little bit of energy, and it’s in the right space now to where we could use community almost as a lead magnet to begin to separate people into different categories. So there would be a free community aspect, and then there would be a channel inside the community that wouldn’t be open, that wouldn’t be free. And that would be for people that were paid students or people that paid for consulting. And so those are just different ways that you could leverage the idea of a professional community is you would have different layers or levels or tiers of access dealing with a profession, and then you’re able to leverage that for revenue and income with expansion of other products.
[00:06:45.350] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, and it leaves to mastermind groups. It can lead to individual mentorship and coaching. I think I was watching one individual that He’s got very successful course in the SEO space. You have to pre-apply. It only takes a certain amount of students. The course costs about $10,000, but it’s highly rated, all the reviews. Like I say, you got to pre-apply because he’s looking for people that are really motivated because that’s why he’s got over 155 star reviews. There are people getting a lot of success there. I’m just going to quickly go through these communities because people, as Kirk pointed out, we get a lot of people that just want to add community to a membership website. I think that could work, but it’s much better if you’re looking to build your membership in these four subcategories. It’s going to be easier to add community to them. They are professional communities. What I mean that is you’re offering training in the health, in the education, where they’ve got to get continuous education or they have to prove. You’re offering training, support, community around requirements of continuous education or training that that’s necessary. Very popular with associations.
[00:08:36.120] – Jonathan Denwood
A lot of associations are around professional bodies. It will make the association more valued to its memberships. Having real community, I think it’s very beneficial to association. Not all of them because some of them are trade-based. But I say that building conversation in your particular Trade Association is probably beneficial. What would you say about that?
[00:09:09.120] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think I got lost with you there a little bit, just to be honest with you. You were talking about professional versus trades. Did I get that correct?
[00:09:17.560] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, both can benefit from building community. If you got a Trade Association or you got a professional-based association.
[00:09:24.560] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. In my head, Jonathan, just to be honest, I consider them almost the same. A plumber, a carpenter, a lawyer, away from the actual job, the communication requirements are almost the same. And so it’s interesting. And I think more and more, we used to refer to trades people as trades people, right? People that just work with their hands, grunt, blue collar. But their jobs, their their pathways have become more technical as well. So they’re right in the space.
[00:09:59.920] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Support communities, well, they can overlap with the first one, but the way my mind works is coaching, personal support, mental health, health issues, people that got particular long term chronic diseases or that. But it’s a much broader sector which can all be covered by support communities. But I suppose it can also cover sport. But that is probably covered by number three we’re going to talk about. How would you classify support communities?
[00:10:38.500] – Kurt von Ahnen
I see that from a coaching standpoint, I think that’s a really good entry point for a lot of folks. So coaching is interesting because coaching is like consulting. It’s like a mastermind. It’s like you’re not exactly training, you’re extracting information from the subject themselves through good questions, good communication. Having them in a community atmosphere for communication at scale can work really, really well to help build your business.
[00:11:14.260] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m going to quickly go for the last two because I really want to get on to section two before we go for our middle break. That’s interest-based communities. I think that’s like sports comes to mind, fishing, any hobby-based, and then you got personal brand. Well, some people have got a personal brand online, on radio, on television, but definitely on YouTube, in social media. They’re on TikTok and they’ve built a substantial community, so they’ve got a personal brand, and they’re just trying to add conversation under their own control. What do you reckon about those last two?
[00:11:57.560] – Kurt von Ahnen
The personal brand is the one that I have a big question mark on because the whole idea is… So maybe I think of like, we talked about Alex Ramosey in school, right? So that’s a big name.
[00:12:10.660] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s a personal brand.
[00:12:11.720] – Kurt von Ahnen
That’s a personal brand community, right? So that very much fits. But I think if we’re gearing this particular show to new membership and course creator types of audience, that’s a long time coming. It takes a while to get there.
[00:12:28.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. So let’s go on because obviously this should be a… But I think I wanted to describe some subcategories where community really works well based on our experience, doesn’t it, Kurt? So let’s go to key strategies, community building using social media. I think we keep hammering away with this first one, but I think it’s all important. I haven’t applied it myself, and it’s always got me… It’s always led to maybe more work than what was necessary. And that’s understanding your audience, having an avatar, and understanding their problems, what they’re interested in, finding a niche, maybe, a niche audience. What would you say about number one of these subcategories?
[00:13:19.840] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, the number one thing, understand your audience, is I find what… I’ve made this mistake, and I’ve worked with a lot of clients who I’ve seen making the same mistake. And let’s just be clear, I think that’s part of the benefit of working with someone like me or Jonathan. We have the experience we can recognize those earmarks, right? I built a whole program and I knew my audience. I knew who I was going to… I knew who my where my students were going to be, and I built all this cool marketing content, what I failed to realize was those people were never going to swipe a credit card and buy my training or access to my community. It was actually going to be their bosses that would have to pay for that. Basically, I knew the audience that I was going to be working with, but I didn’t understand the audience that was making the purchase decision. It’s a real sketchy game that we play when we’re talking about know your audience or understand your audience. In this framework, we’re talking about who’s actually going to swipe a credit card and increase your business with revenue.
[00:14:22.640] – Kurt von Ahnen
You want to make sure that you have content that appeals to the people that you’ll be working with, but also the people that might swipe the credit cards and join join the project.
[00:14:31.780] – Jonathan Denwood
The only way that might, and you’re probably, I’m pretty sure that you thought all this out, is the particular example that you gave us is that you offer a much cheaper, much smaller a lower cost course aimed at those lower targets. But you probably thought that anyway, and you come to the conclusion, even if you got them as students and you asked them to refer you or get you in with the principal of the dealership, it might get you an introduction, but you probably made to the conclusion that it won’t be a strong enough introduction to make a difference. Would that be right?
[00:15:13.720] – Kurt von Ahnen
It would be like to take it away from my picture. Let’s go a different route. Let’s say that you create this really awesome course and community for human resource representatives that work with mid-size companies all across the United States, and you gear all your messaging towards it’s these human resources people. We have to understand the human resource director probably isn’t going to be the one to be able to give you the credit card for the access. They’re going to have to get permission from the vice president or the president of their company for that budgetary thing. So your marketing, your delivery of sales material should be to the vice president or president, not to the human resource lady. Because let’s be clear, the human resource people, they hired for their known expertise. They got hired for what they supposedly bring to the table. And so when you put them in a position of having to go to their boss and say, Hey, could you give me five grand for this training program? It’ll make me better at my job. They’re instantly thinking, Why am I going to pay another five grand to make you better at something you’re already supposed to know what to do?
[00:16:19.000] – Kurt von Ahnen
You want to make sure that you market to the right people.
[00:16:21.520] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, sure. Developing compelling content. I think that’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it? But what is compelling? It’s just the volume, but there are tools now, AI tools. We’re going to be discussing some of the leading tools in the second half of the show that can help you. It’s just the volume of content. I haven’t made my decision. Some people say you need to be on all social media platforms. I think if you’re an individual, entrepreneur, or a small team, that’s difficult. I really think you got to choose one or two or two or three at the max social media platforms, and you religiously need to post on. I’ve been pretty good until the last couple of months about that, haven’t I? But for various reasons, I’ve been busy on other things. I need to get back into that. But I couldn’t cover… I think it’s a good idea to try different platforms, and there will be certain social media platforms that you gel with, and there’ll be others that you don’t. Do you think I’m right about that?
[00:17:34.160] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I think. I agree with you.
[00:17:41.360] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, but compelling content, that’s a very broad statement, isn’t it? Because a lot of the content, I think if you can get it up to 80%, I think it’s fine because that last 20% of quality is going to take time and it’s the volume you’re knocking out. It depends. Some content, you get a lot of response, and it doesn’t need to be slick, does it?
[00:18:07.220] – Kurt von Ahnen
No. See, that was the hesitation in my answer, Jonathan. I have so many pieces that I thought were too basic or too plain or not insightful enough, but I put them up anyway. And they get great traffic. And then you have stuff that you work really hard on that’s really top shelf. And maybe it’s too high brow. Maybe people just it’s over their heads. Sometimes I find that our audience is much more simple than we assume they are. And so sometimes when we say make compelling content, I think it’s really important to drive content from different entry points and make sure that you hit each level of intellect coming to your audience.
[00:18:50.260] – Jonathan Denwood
Then actively engage with your four years. Love podcasting, but it’s its main problem, isn’t it? You can only engage through X, I, If they go to the YouTube, please go to the WP Tonic YouTube channel, which we’ve got over 1,700 videos about membership and tools and just loads of resources, and you’ll be able to watch less recording. But it’s really hard to get into activity through podcasting, isn’t it? But that’s why you need maybe to cut up bits up and put them on TikTok TikTok, on Instagram, put them on YouTube, to get that interaction with your audience, because it’s practically impossible with podcasting, isn’t it?
[00:19:44.480] – Kurt von Ahnen
I told you before, when I had my own podcast, I was literally going to push the button and turn the thing off, just delete the thing. I didn’t think it was working. I wasn’t seeing the engagement. I wasn’t seeing the responses. And then I went out to live events and people would run into me and say, Oh, you’re the Manana Nomas guy. I’ve been watching your show for years. That’s when I was like, There’s no way I’m turning this thing off. It obviously works, but I have no way of actually seeing its success.
[00:20:11.680] – Jonathan Denwood
I think the next one is one of my strengths. I see what you say, be transparent and authentic. I’ve always tried to be honest with my audience the best I can, apart from when I’m kidding myself. I think you’re the same. I think you’re What you see of Kirk when we’re on doing this podcast and you’re watching us is what you get privately. I think, hopefully, you would agree, what you see here for me is what you get in private as well. Would you agree with that?
[00:20:44.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, that to me is so huge because I’ve met some people off-screen, and when I meet them off-screen and they’re not who I expect them to be, it’s really quite a disappointment.
[00:20:56.660] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Always listen to your feedback of your audience. Well, if you can get feedback, that’s one of the problems podcast, but when you do get feedback, obviously, you don’t have to follow it totally, but you should really listen. It is important. And collaborating with influencers, well, that’s something… Well, I think with the Roundtable show and having people and being open to allow other influencers and creators in the WordPress, YouTube, I’ve been reasonably open in having people on the show, the other show that we do, the WP Tonic Show. What would you say?
[00:21:40.800] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, it’s funny because literally today, I was just looking at some of the software and plugins that I’ve been using. And those inspirations came from participating in the show with you and getting access to other people. And some of the platforms that we’ve used in AI have been because we’ve interviewed people AI on the show. I think working with the influencers and movers and shakers in the space is what gives us that well-rounded approach that we have here on this show.
[00:22:12.180] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re going to round up the first part of the show. In the second half of the show, we’re going to be talking about software and services that can help you produce social media content in 2026. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. It’s been a great first half. Before we go into the second half, I want to point out we got a great course done by Kirk himself. It shows you how to build a membership community-strike website from beginning to end using the best WordPress technology. It’s normally around $50. You can get it for under half price. Plus, we got a list of created plugins and services, the best to help you build a membership website, and some special offers from the major sponsors of the show. You can get all these goodies by going over to wpiphonic. Com/membership. Com/membership. Wp-tonic. Com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deal, and you find all the goodies there. So on we go. So I started off with something that might not be seen as social media, but I think video is really important. I think getting video content, which then you can turn into short content, but also have content that’s long content, which in Google’s eyes is anything over three seconds, but I see it around 30 to 45 minutes plus myself.
[00:23:54.460] – Jonathan Denwood
I see YouTube. Youtube has become one of the largest It’s quasar social media channels out there, and people have based their whole business on their YouTube audience. Doing live streaming is seen as a way of getting a large audience. We livestream this podcast, or this show, I should say. I should get rid of the word podcast and use the word show. Live streaming is important, and having a platform that lets you do it easily and well is important. For this podcast and for the other WP tonic podcast, I use StreamYard. Streamyard was bought out by a company called Bending Spoon, I think over 18 months ago. They got rather controversial because they really put the prices up. They’re adding a lot of new functionality, which I haven’t really looked at, but recently they’ve added a lot. But the main thing is they’re not very transparent about their pricing. My pricing comes up at the beginning of April. I’m probably going to move to a other platform or I’m going to unsubscribe and see what they’re going to offer me because they’re very, I wouldn’t say misleading, but they are not very open now about what their charges is.
[00:25:42.800] – Jonathan Denwood
How would you respond to what I’ve just said, Kurt?
[00:25:45.780] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I got my renewal notice from StreamYard and discontinued them on the Mañana No Mas channel, which is a shame because I really like the product. I do. I mean, we’re using it right now and I like the product. And we use it with Lifter LMS for one of the things I do with Lifter. And the new features we actually use, like there’s sound effects now, and you can put in like little inset movies and stuff, and you can do some cool stuff with it. It’s almost like you can produce a show without having to download the video and edit the show, right? It’s almost like having a tricaster. If you’re familiar with TV talk, it’s almost like having a It’s getting better and better, but I don’t want to pay $1,000 a year for it.
[00:26:35.260] – Jonathan Denwood
No, I’ve got the lower plan. The problem is it doesn’t give 4x. Is it 4x? What’s it called? Sorry, I’ve lost it. But the quality that you’re looking for from the video, I’ve got the 720 plan.
[00:26:50.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, so instead of being at 4K or 1080p?
[00:26:53.880] – Jonathan Denwood
4k, yeah. If I do plan, I do plan to increase the quality. I really need. But I’m not prepared to spend $1,000 with them to get that.
[00:27:06.080] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. For the $1,000, you do get the extra channels to stream to, so you can do more than three channels at a time and that thing. But what we did at Mañana No Mas was we really looked at our numbers and we said, how many people are watching the live stream? How much is the streaming really paying off for us in exposure versus reposting publishing a recording of the video? And we weren’t seeing that big of a deal in it. So we held off on StreamYard. And Jonathan, I don’t know if you know this or not, but I’ve been publishing a lot through Rumbl now. I got an account with Rumbl With Rumbl, it’s free and you can stream directly to YouTube, Facebook, X, and if you have a locals channel to locals, and it streams to all of those while you’re making your content.
[00:27:58.320] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, I’ll look at it. One of their main competitors that’s come on is EV Max, or some people call it EV Max, other people call it EV Max. It’s quite powerful. They’ve got a free product, but I think it’s got water marks, but the basic is 25, and the pro is 49 a month. It’s powerful, and it’s very similar to StreamYard. Apart from what you’ve just suggested, which I’m going to have a look at, is just before April, I’ll probably will go to EV Max or the next one we can discuss. Did you look at EV Max when you were looking at Championship?
[00:28:57.200] – Kurt von Ahnen
No, actually, you brought it to my attention for this show. So the one thing that caught my eye was the amount of stuff that I could do. So a prerecorded stream at $25 a month, I could do 2 hours a month. I can multi stream to four destinations, 20 gigs of storage. So it’s a little less storage than you get with StreamYard. So you got to manage your recordings better. There was a couple of things there that were reduced over the StreamYard offering, but at $25 a month is cheaper than StreamYard. So then I was like, okay, this is pretty cool. It’s worth taking a look at. Where I got confused was their pricing plans were split up by individual versus business. And when you go into business, it jumps to $300 a month and gives you 10 hours Stream up to 10 hours each live. I was confused as to what the each was.
[00:29:53.800] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I need to look at that. Another one, but it’s Mac only, but it’s really popular, is Ecam. Standard 20, Pro 40. They’ve been around a number of years. But like I say, it’s Mac only. What do you know about these people? Because this is another one I’ll probably all look Yeah, I’m a PC guy, so it was never on my radar.
[00:30:20.000] – Kurt von Ahnen
I have had clients that used it in the past, and they were advocates. They really liked it. Where I got confused It was it said like, E-Cam for Zoom, right? And I was like, well, Zoom is already a video tool. So what is this doing that’s different? But it does have 4K streaming and things like that. I almost see it like a restream alternative, right? Where It’s still going through your stream product like Zoom, but it’s streaming out to other channels. Is that how this is working?
[00:30:52.840] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, but it has got similar functionality to StreamYard or EV Max, so it definitely can be there. A couple of others, you got OBS, which is free, but it is complicated. It used to be a bit flaky, but I think you can use it. Another one is Riverside. That seems to a lot of people are plugging that. They were more into podcasting than that, but they got a product for $29. They got their Live at 39 and Webinar at 99. It’s definitely been pushed by a lot of influencers, Riverside.
[00:31:39.420] – Kurt von Ahnen
I used Riverside with WP Minute.
[00:31:42.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, yeah? How have you found it?
[00:31:45.100] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s wonderful. It’s very intuitive for the guest, very intuitive for the host. And as a host, when you’re done recording, it does what StreamYard does. It records locally. So if you have a bad Internet connection with or something like that, you still get a really great product at the end because it stitches the local recordings together for you. So that part’s awesome. And then when you’re done recording an episode with somebody, it automatically starts breaking out shorts for you and things like that. Riverside, as far as a features and benefits tool, is really quite interesting. It works really, really well.
[00:32:25.560] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I might look at that then because, like you said, it’s breaking up in and that. They’re killing two birds with one stone. So I definitely will have a look at that. Like I say, the Pro or the live 29, 39 month to month is not ridiculously priced, is it?
[00:32:43.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
No. And Like I said, I used Riverside. I use Rumbel personally for some stuff. I do some stuff with OBS and Zoom together. I was able to do some things that way. But to your point, I think OBS is I hate the idea when we say it’s open source or however you want to phrase that, and it just seems like it implies difficulty, but there are levels of difficulty to it. And you’ll notice when we’re doing a mastermind and someone’s having camera problems on a community Zoom call. It’s generally someone that has OBS hooked up.
[00:33:20.440] – Jonathan Denwood
The reason why we… Because live streaming is getting more and more important, folks, and videos getting more and more important in social media, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. If you want to build your audience and you want to get people into your membership site using video in 2026, it’s just going to get more important. I thought we would start off with… Because you can use these live streamings to record, download it, get it cut up, depending on which system you’re using or there’s third-party systems that do that. It’s just important. Now, let’s look at the scheduler. Because consistency is important. Using the scheduler is probably a good idea. Now, I’ve got one from Buffer. I used to use it myself. The free has been crippled a fair bit. The essential is six dollars a month. The team is twelve dollars. Good scheduler when I was using it, but that was about three or four years ago. Then you got Adobe Express, which is controversial because it’s Adobe. Not everything’s free. If you want the top, but it does a ton of stuff. Not only as a scheduler, it’s going to be in one of the other subcassets.
[00:34:45.190] – Jonathan Denwood
Categories as well. So they’re offering it for free. How long? Well, not everything’s free as it is. It’s Adobe. But what it offers. Then the last one, I’ve got SocialPilot, which starts at $30, so there’s a big jump, but it’s more of if you got a team or you’re a quasar social media agency. But the price, if you’ve got a number of social media accounts and you got one or three people helping you manage it, probably social pilot at $30 isn’t a bad idea. What would you say about the three I’ve just outlined?
[00:35:32.660] – Kurt von Ahnen
Buffer, just like yourself, I used to use that a while ago. Buffer, to me, worked well when I was getting started. I just want to put it like that. It was basic, and it was like, post this, post this, and I could set it up for certain dates. That was great. I got spoiled by Sprout Social, which is a very expensive platform for social media. Sprout Social.
[00:35:58.630] – Jonathan Denwood
I went to their website, and they don’t show their prices. I couldn’t find their prices.
[00:36:03.440] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, they may have gone to an enterprise model, Jonathan. The last I used it, it was like 350 bucks a month or something. I used it appropriately. I got spoiled by it because it had a lot of really cool features. And because I got spoiled in that way, I started looking for things that would allow me to emulate that away from that. So right now, I personally use a system called Hero Post. Hero Post gives me unlimited social channels that I can post to. And when I post something, I can reschedule the post. So I can have it go out every two days for the next month or every three days for the next 60 days or whatever. And those are the types of tools that I like. What I really like about Sprout Social and what Adobe does also is you could load up a photo and it would trim that photo for the application it was going to post to. So like Sprout Social, I could load up a photo and it would say trim it for Instagram, trim it for Facebook, trim it for whatever, and it would edit the photo automatically, which was super, super cool.
[00:37:13.260] – Kurt von Ahnen
Hero Post doesn’t do that. And so with Hero Post, if I go to load something up to Facebook or LinkedIn and then add it to Instagram, I’ll get an error that says Instagram can’t take the photo because it’s not the right proportions. Whereas Adobe Express will alter the images for you. So now the next question that the viewers and listeners are going to have, they’re going to say, well, Kurt, if you have Adobe Express, because I’m an Adobe Creative Cloud user, they’re going to say, if you already have that and you have the paid version of it, how come you don’t use it? And I’m going to tell you this, Jonathan, everything in Adobe to me is confusing. Everything. I go to do something in Photoshop, I get lost. I use Premiere Pro like a mad dog, but that’s just because I had to use it corporately for years, and I’m okay with editing video. But as an infrastructure, all of those Adobe tools, I have access to all of them, and it’s so confusing to get into something and get proficient at it. So I just pay for the other platform to use it.
[00:38:19.120] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think the Adobe Express is doing a fair bit. What I’ve looked at here is not too bad, but everything you said about their other products, I totally agree with. The social pilot, I haven’t used that in anger at all, but the research I did, it looked pretty slick. It’s a bit like what you were saying about social… Was it Sprout?
[00:38:44.160] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sprout Social.
[00:38:45.060] – Jonathan Denwood
It looks quasar professional tool, but the prices aren’t outrageous, so I thought I would add it to the list.
[00:38:52.100] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, what’s nice about SocialPilot is for the $42 a month, the standard, and I should be clear, that’s not super You’re 40 bucks a month. You’re $42 a month to spend.
[00:39:03.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Maybe I’ve got the yearly prices there. You said, Is that month to month?
[00:39:06.920] – Kurt von Ahnen
That was yearly, monthly. Monthly is $50 a month. So $50 a month, 15 social media accounts, three different users, a thousand AI credits, and a social media inbox. A lot of these tools don’t have a social media inbox, so it’s cool that you’re able to do everything right through the platform. It reminds me of the I think, Hootsuite, you used to be able to do everything in one screen, which was cool.
[00:39:35.380] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Does it alter the images for the different social media platforms?
[00:39:41.360] – Kurt von Ahnen
No, I don’t think that it does. No.
[00:39:43.760] – Jonathan Denwood
See, that’s important. On to the next one, social media content builders. Obviously, Canva. Love Canva. Free, not too crippled, but free. I’ve got the paid version. It’s coming up next month. I will still probably cough up the money. It’s 120 a year. Then I’ve got Adobe Express again. I don’t know why I put Surfer on because it’s SEO, but it’s a writing tool. Some of them, it’s a good one, but it starts at $99. I don’t know why I added that to it. I thought content, we got to talk about SEO writer, but you use a couple content tools in the SEO space that a more cheaper, don’t you? But I’ve got, what do you reckon about Canva?
[00:40:35.560] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I’ve got it. And I stick with the paid version because I’ve got family members on the same account. My daughter’s younger. She uses it for her business. My son plays with it and then does stuff for school with it. So we use Canva. But what I think is interesting is Canva held the market for a long time on just being this really cool, simple, an artistic space. But all these other tools started kicking up with similar things. And so I have a YouTube tool that I use that will generate thumbnails for me. Well, I was generating thumbnails in Canva, right? And then you start thinking about these other tools, all these other things are starting to come up with these AI injections where it’ll help you make or formulate these things. And I’m wondering how much that’s going to encroach on Canva in the next one to three years. But Canva, for now, It seems to be the ubiquitous leader in the space.
[00:41:34.180] – Jonathan Denwood
Then I’ve listed the Adobe Express again, but I suppose your thoughts, you’ve already expressed those. It’s amazing. Not everything is for free, but there’s a lot that is. But it’s more about the company more than anything.
[00:41:49.560] – Kurt von Ahnen
There’s something about the Express that I want to mention on the show, and that’s when you have an Adobe account and you set things up correctly, which I’m not saying I have, you can set up multiple brands and multiple palettes and multiple… As if you were an agency and you had multiple clients, you could set up different client accounts with different branding guidelines and different core colors, and you can do that. But that’s the point that I was making earlier, was that that adds a level of complexity that you may or may not be looking for. And so I don’t want my negative words here to imply that the product is horrible. The product is not horrible. It’s just applicable to a lot of people that I talk to in the space.
[00:42:33.320] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. I’ll put this server and I think it’s a bit rich, really. But I think there’s a couple of other tools that you use. Anything you want to mention?
[00:42:43.800] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m using a ton of things right now, Jonathan. I mean, as far as making content, so you had mentioned before how important you thought video was. I make a ton of video content, and then I run it through Descript, which altars the audio for me, and I’m able to trim the video with the text editor, which is really cool. So if I have a lot of ums and ums, I can take the ums and ums out and it edits the video with the ums and ums out of the video, which is awesome. And then Descript also makes those short clips that we were talking about earlier. And so I used to subscribe to Opus AI, which is a fantastic clip making tool. I have nothing against Opus AI except that Riverside makes the clips, Descript makes the clips. Gosh, I got something else that makes the clips, too. I can’t remember what that was. But when you have all these tools that are duplicating the same features, it makes it really hard to keep paying for all.
[00:43:47.440] – Jonathan Denwood
I didn’t know Riverside. I definitely will be looking at Riverside now because I’ll be killing two birds with one stone. I’m definitely not going to stay because I need to do 4K, really. Both cameras I’ve got, and I I need to be able to switch from one camera. I have got the setup that allows me to do it. I just haven’t bothered. I need to up the game and put a bit more effort on production. Not go bizarre, but just a bit more effort on it. I’ll definitely be looking at Riverside. What about there’s a couple that AI posts, the writers. There’s one particular product That’s what you use, isn’t it?
[00:44:32.660] – Kurt von Ahnen
Now you’ve got me confused. I use Magi for a lot of AI tasks.
[00:44:36.540] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, Magi.
[00:44:38.140] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. With Magi, Magi is like… That’s like putting JetGPT, Perplexity, Grok, and all these tools into one platform. It’s 20 bucks a month, and it gives me access to all the major AI tools.
[00:44:53.720] – Jonathan Denwood
I think he’s coming on the show again in November.
[00:44:56.660] – Kurt von Ahnen
Dustin?
[00:44:57.640] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes.
[00:44:58.260] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, he’s a nice guy. He’s a really nice guy. He gave me a little bit of a hard time after our AI review show, so he got me to try it because he had given me a hard time. He says, ‘Oh, you didn’t review Magi.’ Then I went back to take another look at it, and I’ve just fallen in love all over again. As far as where the tools go, we had… His name was Ryan. I can’t remember his last name from Write Blogger.
[00:45:22.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes.
[00:45:23.180] – Kurt von Ahnen
And that is a phenomenal tool, Jonathan.
[00:45:26.480] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s one of his shows, where he’s coming back at the beginning of December.
[00:45:30.000] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, we should probably keep mentioning him. I mean, they’ve just done some improvements to Write Blogger. I still have an account on Write Blogger, and I occasionally use it. And here’s why I like it. When I go into Write Blogger and want to create a blog post for a WordPress page, it generates the post and formats it so that I can simply copy and paste it into my page. If you write a post in ChatGPT, you must copy and paste it into your site’s post, then format it. You’ve got to set up the H1s, the H2s, and the spacings and all the stuff. You’ve got to look at all the punctuation. You’ve got to move everything around. When you take it from a write blogger, it’s ready to go. Boom, boom. And Right Blogger has a cool feature where they can take your YouTube video and, instead of creating a transcript, create a sister blog post based on a summary of the video. And so when you take that summary and your video and put it in a single post. It’s a really clean setup.
[00:46:33.140] – Jonathan Denwood
Hopefully, maybe because I need to do that, because I plan to make a lot more video content in ’26. And hopefully Riverside might do that because I have got another transcription tool. I’ve got a lifetime deal. I probably could use that, but it’s not unlimited, so I need a tool that can help out. I definitely look at that. Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to Kurt.
[00:47:02.640] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, for business, it’s Manana Nomas. It’s manananomas. Com and then Manana Nomas on X and Facebook. Then, if you want to make a connection on LinkedIn, I’m Kurt von Annen, and I’m the only Kurt von Annen listed there. If you look me up, there I am, you know you got me.
[00:47:18.020] – Jonathan Denwood
If you want to support the show, folks, and you’re listening on your phone, either on iTunes or Spotify, it makes it really easy to leave a review. It could be one star, two stars, or five stars. Just leave us a review. Give your honest opinion. Are you getting value from this show? Hopefully you are. That’s the main purpose: to get value from it. If you could do that, both Kirk and I would be very appreciative because it shows us to new people and it helps build the show. And it encourages us to continue making these episodes, which I hope you’re finding valuable. We will be back next week with another topic that will help you build a successful membership and community website, achieving the success you’re looking for yourself and your family. We will be back soon, folks. Bye.
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