Many webmasters, website owners and marketers publish their own blogs. It’s a great way to express your passion, talk about your business and assist your marketing efforts. If blogs are popular, wordpress is the celebrity platform of choice. But can you get more out of wordpress? Is there a way to build a bigger community of visitors, fans and evangelists that all want to talk about you and your blog? There is now. It’s called buddypress and it’s much more than just a wordpress plugin.
In today’s video Andy Peatling, developer of buddypress, talks about what it is and why you would use it in a recent presentation at WordCamp 2009 NYC. Buddypress is a social layer that sits on top of wordpress. But instead of your visitor just reading blog posts, with buddypress the focus is now on your user.
Features include creating groups, making friends and contributing to forums. Users can PM (Private Message) each other and create their own profiles. Instead of just getting to know the blog, visitors can get to know each other too. Even better, buddypress shows an aggregated activity stream in real-time, just like facebook. It’s like facebook on a blog.
You could create a sports team, company intranet, magazine, local interest or community with any group of people sharing a passion. Example sites are bike riding in oregan, recipe sharing, VW Golf fan site and lots more examples to show just what it can do. I think it’s a great idea. Social networking sites are hugely popular and it’s a fact you can increase your business by creating a community interested in you and what you have to share.
Branding, community and wordpress is an unbeatable combination.
