WordPress offers many solutions and plugins for creating a social media platform. One great thing about WordPress is that it was originally designed for blog posts. This framework can easily be changed into a social media platform by allowing users to post as well. Even if you are not an experienced with coding, you can still design a website with user registration, front end posting, and commenting. I am currently building my own social media platform with WordPress and this post will take you through my experience creating the site.
While it is possible to use plugins to build a social media platform with WordPress, I recommend having someone who can code to work on this project if you are serious about building a good platform. The reason being is it will give you more options to customize how things work and with social media, customization is very important. If you want to make money with a social media platform, you can’t build a clone. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. already exists. Its where the people are at and even if you build a perfect clone that performs great or even better, the people are still on these other platforms and they are not leaving any time soon. You must build a platform for a niche market. Get specific about the audience you want. Your platform should not be for everybody. Otherwise you will be competing with the biggest tech companies in the world and that is not a fight you will win. If you can make a platform that is good for a specific group of people on the other hand, there is a chance your site will be successful. This type of specificity will require custom plugins and code to work properly.
Here are some things that I custom built for my social media site.
- Frontend Posting
- Ordering Comments by most liked
- Frontend way to add new categories
- Child posts and post hierarchy
Plugins and themes I used.
- Like/Dislike Comment Plugin
- Analytify
- Made a child theme of already existing theme for further customization
Stay tuned, my new social media platform will be coming out soon. keep in contact with me on Twitter and leave a comment if you have any questions or comments regarding what it takes to build a social media platform with WordPress. See you next time!
