Not all social networking sites are developed and designed on same features. If you have decided to settle down to work on WordPress as your CMS tool and want to build a social networking site or wish to add community features to an existing ?????? website, then you can have a decent option for making your site more interactive. Over the past couple of years, several plugins have been developed as strong contenders to transform easily your WordPress site into a full-featured social networking site.

In this article, you will come across various applications that will guide you exactly about how to create and design a website like Facebook, Twitter or Orkut by using WordPress. Such application lets you to develop various advanced and highly appealing websites with main social networking features such as user profile, various groups, mentions, activity feeds and many more such advanced level social networking features.

Why should you create your own social network?

• Engagement

It enables high communication method with your customers, to learn their preferences and to pick up their feedback instantly.

• Focus

Building  your own private social network will focus only on one topic that genuinely interests your visitors.

• Profits

Instead of clicking on Facebook’s ads, your members will prefer clicking more on your ads, buy your products and share your contents.

Now, here I introduce you guys with four main WordPress plug-ins to develop your own social networking sites

• PeepSo

Creates your own private social networking websites with PeepSo that offers a state of the art Open Source WordPress plugin tool for you  with wide number of  powerful features.

Benefits of using Peepso brands

• Artists
• Non-profit organizations
• Schools/Universities
• Authors
• Political campaigns
• Dating sites
• Hobbies/Interest groups

• BuddyPress

BuddyPress is commonly known by its common name “social networking in a box” that is one of the most well-known software to convert your WordPress site into a social networking site. It offers wide range of plug-ins that comes with professionally profound list of core features:

• Private Messaging
• Extended Profiles
• Activity Streams
• User Groups
• Friend Connections
• Discussion Forums

BuddyPress offer numerous of advanced components to turn on/off  WordPress functionalities at your will without any foundations. It comes with the huge flexibility to restrict your website’s feature to work with only to restricted members. BuddyPress offers an active and enthusiastic community with great offerings of open source plugins.

• WP Symposium

WP Symposium is another advance alternative to BuddyPress. One of the biggest advantages of WP Symposium is that it easily fits into any WordPress website as a part of your theme. One of the most commonly ongoing development of WP Symposium is to develop the plugin in extremely a simple mode to enable easy access for users its various functionalities.

WP Symposium features:

• Forum
• Activity wall
• Member directory
• Private mail
• Notification bar
• Chat windows and chat room
• RSS activity feeds and support for other plugins such as Groups, Events, Gallery, Facebook Connect and Mobile support

WP Symposium posses an extremely strong support system for, a helpful wiki searching mode and a helpdesk for members wto enable them to access professional assistance. If you like quick releases with quick bug fixes, instead of long waits between major releases, then I will definitely recommend you to work with WP Symposium, which is of course a great option for you.

• WP Mingle

WP Mingle comes with a free plugin software that instantly adds various different social networking features into the WordPress site. This WP MIngle plugin aim towards providing various social experience where users never need to watch the WordPress login as well as admin features. Using WP Mingle looks and its layouts will give you a little different look from the other plugins.

WP Mingle features:

• User Profile Pages and Custom Profile Fields (configurable by the admin)
• Pretty Profile Urls (to help with memorability and Google Indexing)
• Ability to Upload custom avatars (with Gravatar fallback)
• User Friending and Friend Activity pages
• User Profile Posting and Commenting (for friends)
• Login, Navigation, Random and Recent Users Widgets
• Email Notifications and User Email Notification Opt-Outs
• Front end login, logout, lost password and registration system
• Twitter-Like user tagging (using the @ symbol followed by the user’s name)
• Private Messaging