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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: