WordPress As A Social Media Platform

Last week in a meeting with other social media consultants, we talked about how far WordPress has come in the last year. With a thriving ecosystem of themes and plugins, the open source blogging software has turned into a serious content management system (CMS) but is still relatively easy for anyone with reasonable technical abilities to administer.

We also noted that all the required social media services are supported making WordPress a great platform for conversational marketing. So I thought I would revive my earlier series on WordPress over the next few weeks and take a deep dive into exactly how a winery can build their website using this free software. Along the way I’ll build a demo site here giving you a place to kick the tires and decide if this will work for you.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a couple plugins that I’ve recently implemented on my wine blog that show the potential for WordPress as a social media platform:

• Lifestream – Provides a running list of links on your sidebar as you post to various social networks or sharing services.
• Facebook Connector – Implements Facebook Connect to send blog comments to your Facebook profile and also provide an easy way for your Facebook friends to interact with your blog.

I’ll spend more time in future posts showing exactly how these plugins are configured.

Related articles by Zemanta

• WordPress News: Buddy Press Almost Ready, WordCamp Las Vegas Success, Plugin Author Tips, WordPress Tattoo
• The Many Applications of WordPress

Related posts:

1. Build A Website With WordPress, Part 2
2. Choosing Social Sites
3. Getting Ready For WordPress 2.7
4. What is social media?
5. Build A Website With WordPress, Part 3

Tagged as: Content management system, social media, Social network, wordpress