Buddypress

A couple of years ago, Ning came out as a potential solution to creating one's own network. The problem with Ning was - and is - that it's hard work getting a bunch of people to all decide that your particular niche network is the place they need to spend all their time at, especially when the uber-enormous Facebook has its own little groups, and they're more happening with other users.

So creating your own network has sort of been on the outs.

Enter BuddyPress, which is essentially a Wordpress MU plugin that allows you to create your own social network. What's more, since the login uses Facebook Connect, you can hit the ground running already with a site that millions of users can have access to.

While I'm not quite sold on the idea of a company having it's own social network in lieu of a Facebook Page or a Twitter account, there are a lot of advantages to setting up such an area if you already have a lot of grassroots interest in what you do.

For starters, setting up an account on one of these sites is very easy to do, and once a user is done the page they come away with is essentially a WordPress blog all their own. Or so it seems - in fact, if you are running this program on your own server and domain, these mini-blogs and site content will turn your visitors into content generators for you. If, for example, you have 50 people who are very interested in what your company sells, and you gain them as members, they will write on occaision in their blog, and those blog updates are fresh content for Google. If the posts are particularly good, people will link to them, and all that link juice will come back to improve the rankings on your site.

In a way, it is a brilliant way to get content developers for your site who will work for free.

This is really my first review of Buddypress, but it does give me great ideas for how to make it work for natural search. If anything else, it's a great new potential business model for social overall: Users can have fun, as long as they continue to write for the host site.

About the Author: Eric Reid

I am the Social Media Services Manager for Off Madison Ave. I've been with the company since 2006, when I was hired to do SEO, and link building in particular. When social networking sites started cropping up, at first I started using them to create backlinks - but they weren't the best for that, given all of the "nofollow" attributes. However, I did see the potential for all of the direct referral traffic they represent. Since then I've been actively pursuing both tactics for clients: Links that can help them for search, and social postings that get them involved in the conversation. It's about the coolest job you could ever get. ;)

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