by Brenda Barron

Who today hasn’t heard of Facebook? Facebook has now become the number one social network in the world and it has 665 million active users on average each day as was recorded on March 31st 2015 and disclosed by Facebook.

Every month, around 751 million people use Facebook from mobile devices alone. It has over 1.23 billion active users and is valued at $104 billion.

And that’s just Facebook! There’s Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and many other social networks to consider too. But what’s all this got to do with WordPress, you might be wondering?

An Incentive For You To Start Your Own Social Network?

Looking at the above figures, it definitely should make you feel motivated to start your own social network. Whether that’s to dream big and get to the size of Facebook and the others, or simply to provide a network for your friendship, business, or volunteer group.

The good news is that you don’t need to study to become a coding expert and neither do you need to have any technical skills if you want to start your own social network. You can start a really cool one all on your own, just by using the fantastic CMS that is WordPress.

WordPress is so simple to use, everyone from your neighbor in their 60s to your teenage niece are now using it to showcase their hobbies and also to start their own business ventures. You can easily create an interactive social network site, loaded with all kinds of features that you would see on existing ones.

To build a social network yourself, there are only really four WordPress plugins that you need to consider. They’re easy to use, can be set up in no time, and are awesome!

BuddyPress

The BuddyPress plugin has been referred to as “social networking in a box” and that’s an apt description. There are a host of core features that you can build into your WordPress social networking website. Each of these can be turned on or off whenever you like, giving you full control over your site. Take a look:

• Users can create their own profiles
• Users can then start making friendships with other users and form specific groups
• Groups can see their own activity streams
• Users can private message each other
• It’s easy to set what notifications and email settings you receive

BuddyPress Can Do A Lot…

With the BuddyPress plugin, you can build just about any kind of social network that you dream of. For instance, you might want to build one for football fans, cricket lovers, bird watchers, or church members.

Your members will be able to contact each other and network, plus they will get the latest updates of all that is happening in the community you’ve built.

You can create user profiles, create groups, and create a system for private messages. There’s so much more potential too as BuddyPress works with other WordPress plugins, such as site tracking and allowing attachments.

…And It’s Free

Yes BuddyPress, which does superb things and supplies a total social networking package, is absolutely free.

On top of this, there’s a large community of BuddyPress users. This means that if you have any doubts or questions, just post it in the (free) BuddyPress community and you will get an answer quickly. Plus, members of the BuddyPress community contribute new open source plugins to extend the BuddyPress platform and make it even better.

So by using the BuddyPress plugin, you’ll be a part of an active community that grows rapidly, as well as add some really awesome features to your social network site. And to think that you can do all of this just by adding one simple plugin. Pretty cool, if you ask me.

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