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Social Media for Wordpress: Build Communities, Engage Members and Promote Your Site
Social Media for Wordpress: Build Communities, Engage Members and Promote Your Site

Social Media for Wordpress: Build Communities, Engage Members and Promote Your Site: A quicker way to build communities, engage members, and promote your site with this book and ebook

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Profile Icon Michael Kuhlmann
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Social Media for Wordpress: Build Communities, Engage Members and Promote Your Site

Chapter 2. Building the Social Network: BuddyPress and WP Symposium

It took Mark Zuckerberg about one month to build the first iteration of Facebook. It'll take you only five minutes to build it yourself. Here's the drawback—it'll be just as easy for others, too. Competition is inevitable.

In the first chapter, we covered the importance of your site content and how you can funnel and deliver your content to your audience for easier access. Now, we'll go over some ideas on how you can drive social interactions using plugins, which will greatly extend your WordPress site. Specifically, we'll learn the following:

  • Preparations for rolling out your social media layer

  • Top ten plugins that will help you with BuddyPress development

  • Adding game-like capabilities to help you engage your site members

  • How to adapt and convert site visitors into site members

  • Benefits of using different social networks to connect to your site

  • How user-generated content can have a tremendous impact on your site

So let's get started...

Before you enable the social layer


As tempting as it may seem, going into your WordPress site and activating BuddyPress (BP) and WP Symposium (WPS) simultaneously is the last thing you want to do. It would be the equivalent of wearing a helmet, while you're driving a car around the block. Twice the same functionality does not translate into a better experience. Since the former is the more established plugin, the activities in this chapter, will focus on BuddyPress. Before you get started, however, there are a few things you'll want to consider, outlined as follows.

Take a measured approach to your feature rollout

There is a great amount of noise you have to consider before rolling out a site that features status updates, private messaging, or group discussions. Text messages, tweets, Facebook updates, incoming e-mails, and other disruptive stimuli are already vying for your visitors' attention. Thus limiting the window of opportunity for them to engage with each other. Even with the amount...

Activating BuddyPress plugins


Activating any or all of the BuddyPress plugins listed above is as simple as activating normal WordPress plugins.

  1. 1. First, we will install BuddyPress. Navigate to Plugins | Add New, search for BuddyPress, click on the Install Now link located under the plugin name, proceed with your FTP connection and click on the Activate Plugin link. Follow the remaining steps, using the BuddyPress installation wizard that should take you through a process where you can select which social media components you want to enable, as illustrated in the following screenshot (More detailed instructions can be found at http://codex.buddypress.org/getting-started/setting-up-a-new-installation/).

  2. 2. To install any supplemental plugins, follow Step 1 again and search for the other plugins that you'd like to activate. Starting out, you will most likely only need to activate the BuddyPress Template Pack plugin, if you want to keep the appearance of your current site.

  3. 3. To configure your...

Easing your users into BuddyPress


Taking the path with the least amount of resistance roughly translates into disabling several BuddyPress components. There is a good chance you probably went through the BuddyPress installation wizard and enabled every single component. You may have even gone the extra step to install bbPress for forum integration, but what we'll do now is curb some of that functionality in favor of polishing one component—Extended Profiles, the extra tidbits of information users fill out about themselves like age, location, and so forth.

Time for action—how to convert site visitors to site members


Yes, you can just display a prominent Register Now button somewhere on your website, but for a small, fledgling site that's just starting out, you want to be more proactive about getting new site visitors to convert to site members. We'll complete this three-part activity by first connecting your WordPress site with Facebook, welcoming your new site members and then rewarding them with points.

Part 1—connecting your WordPress site with Facebook

  1. 1. Install and activate the following plugins from the aforementioned top 10 list: WP-FB-AutoConnect, Welcome Pack, Achievement for BuddyPress and WP Super Popup. We'll only use FB-AutoConnect for this part of the activity.

  2. 2. Log into your Facebook account and go to https://developers.facebook.com/apps.

  3. 3. In the upper-right corner, click on the Create New App button to create the application, which will connect WordPress with Facebook.

  4. 4. In the Create New App pop-up window, enter the App...

Gamification: The art of user-generated content


When it comes to your BuddyPress-powered site, you want to make it fun like a game. Posting updates, earning points, and the like should be fun, not a chore. In the previous activity, you provided a user with an incentive to complete an action, which resulted in a profile data transaction that benefitted you as the site owner. Taking this a step further, you can also tie this in with User-Generated Content (UGC) by allowing your members to post content to your site without much work on your part. Best of all, the more UGC that's produced, the more your site will become a social media vehicle for your niche.

Time for action—how to get your users to create original content for you


Increasing your conversion rate for site visitors to site members can be as easy as providing another outlet for your users to interact with your site. If visitors see a flurry of activity on your site through status updates, post publications, comments, or any other form, they will be more likely to become an active member than if you did not support any of those options.

Now, we'll get more creative by allowing your site members to produce content for you, using the Gravity Forms plugin and AddThis service, which is a free third-party social bookmarking service that allows you to share content. For this two-part activity, we'll let your users create reviews and ratings, which they will be able to share.

Part 1—create a post content form with ratings

  1. 1. Navigate to Categories under Posts and create a new category with a Name and Slug of Reviews.

  2. 2. If you haven't purchased Gravity Forms, log on to http://www.gravityforms...

Time for action—how to enable users to share your content


By now, sharing content using social media icons is common practice. If you visit any publishing site, you will see multiple buttons that make it easier for the reader to share a story. In this case, you're going to enable authors to share their content more easily. The last thing people want to do is click on the browser's address bar, copy the link, start up a new browser session, paste the link somewhere and then send it off to a friend. It's not what they're used to, so let's provide this same functionality found on many other sites to simplify this process.

Part 2—simplifying the process of sharing user reviews

  1. 1. Since BuddyPress doesn't ship with automatic sharing capabilities through Facebook, Twitter, or any other social network out of the box, we'll use AddThis instead. If you don't have a Facebook, Twitter, Google, or Open ID account, register for a free AddThis account at http://www.addthis.com, by clicking on the Join...

BuddyPress versus WP Symposium


If privacy is the Achilles' heel of BuddyPress, then this is where WP Symposium (WPS) shines. WPS is an alternative to BP in that it provides the same capabilities out of the box and then some. WPS also includes integrated forums, chat, galleries, events, and mobile access. BP, on the other hand, is also capable of the same extended features, but different developers produce all those plugins.

The issue with privacy

Privacy can make or break your site, literally. BP underwent several attempts at privacy solutions, but one popular plugin in particular, BP Privacy Component, would break occasionally with BP's release cycle. Again, the WordPress repository houses several plugins that can provide possible solutions, but none of them are core to BuddyPress. If you build a site that requires members' profiles to have privacy options and you rely on a plugin that is not core to BuddyPress, it leaves your site vulnerable to the possibility that you may lose that functionality...

Summary


This chapter introduced you to several inalienable truths to building social networking sites. These community sites are first and foremost about the community, their interaction, and site engagement, which you have control over.

In this chapter, we learned about the following:

  • It only takes a few minutes to set up BuddyPress and WP Symposium, but it takes a lot of resources to build your community.

  • There are ten excellent plugins that will speed up site development; nine of them are free.

  • The concept of progressive profiling is an immense asset to producing more meaningful content.

  • UGC also helps with SEO in that your site generates more content, which translates to more chances of search engines indexing your pages.

  • Gamification can make your site more enjoyable to your users, which will attract even more users.

  • The Facebook and AddThis API can lower the barrier of entry to your site.

  • WPS is ideal for smaller niche communities.

  • We also saw some interesting factoids on Mark Zuckerberg's...

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What you will learn

  • Discover the fundamentals, misconceptions and basic implementations of social media as well as WordPress features to drive more site engagement Roll out your social media layer with BuddyPress and add game-like capabilities to help you engage your site members Create group forums using bbPress and BuddyPress, while automatically publishing WordPress posts to Twitter using RSS feeds Incorporate memberships and make category-specific content restrictions applicable only to non-members Implement Google Analytics to tracking your social media efforts and learn how to automatically email analytical reports Easily maintain your site by automatically backing up your site and publishing posts via email Automatically post tweets, so you can spend more time on genuine dialogues and less time on producing relevant tweets Produce QR codes for your print collateral so you can improve the accessibility of the relationships you’ve built online
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Table of Contents

7 Chapters
Share it the Easy Way Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building the Social Network: BuddyPress and WP Symposium Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Community Forums for the Masses Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
VIP Memberships Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Keeping Up with the Stats Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Managing your Site Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Beyond the Plugins Towards True Engagement Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
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Unfortunately, due to several restrictions, we are unable to ship to the following countries:

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  2. American Samoa
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  11. Libiya Arab Jamahriya
  12. Somalia
  13. Sudan
  14. Russian Federation
  15. Syrian Arab Republic
  16. Ukraine
  17. Venezuela