Much of our recent efforts has been devising how client Learndash, WooCommerce, Events and Directory sites can be equipped with powerful social media and community toolsets, as part of the website itself. The core aim here is to further improve on-site interaction and engagement, key to building traffic, sales and retaining clients. This trick also avoids needlessly integrating with, or sending people to third party social media to chat, where you’ll risk losing them to competitors.
Also, with the increasing censorship and de-platforming occurring on the major social media sites, especially those groups discussing politics or health topics, running your own low cost WordPress-based social media platform, just for your followers, under your own control, starts to make a lot of sense in 2023.
WordPress community sites can be extremely inviting, not just with comments tools, but various membership plugins that provide content control for those signed up. We can now add in even more, including Facebook-style chat, groups, friends, audio-video tools. There are endless options around the control and management of content, subscribers, groups, post access and security to ensure we all stay safe. The user and/or site owner decides what can be seen publically or when logged in as a validated user or site member… Stunning.
Now, we can not only build advanced, attractive, fully-branded social websites, but one we can more easily integrate in popular eCommerce and eLearning systems, which other social platforms cannot or will not do for many reasons. Yes, there is a mobile app option, but in my view, seldom needed. All this is a unique and powerful opportunity for WordPress developers, their clients and society at large.
We’ll be expanding on this in future posts. For more information, add your details in the form below.