Who doesn’t know Facebook? It is considered as the most favorite social network platform of all time. But Facebook isn’t just yours. It has a huge number of users and is very less flexible. Have you ever thought of creating a social networking site of your own which is just like Facebook and belongs to you?
Facebook is an amazing social networking site but it’s huge and you can never just focus on one topic on Facebook and moreover it’s not just yours.

Creating your own Social Network Platform. How?

One of the best ways to create a social network site just like Facebook is using an open source Content Management System. Open source CMS is beneficial in many ways:
1. A content management system provides you all the advantages starting from a basic blogging to ecommerce.
2. CMS can also help you in enhancing the SEO of social publishing as well and makes sure that titles, descriptions, and tags are in sync, and avoid duplicating messages.
3. Even if you have little technical expertise, you can easily use a CMS to create a social media site. As its completely open source and flexible.
4. With the help of a CMS, you can just use a plugin such as BuddyPress which provides you a complete functionality of creating a social network community with WordPress.
5. The best part about using a CMS is it is an open source platform. Therefore, the code is open to all and it can be changed as you desire.
6 The community of CMS are strong and they offer complete support and video tutorials.

A social network site with WordPress

WordPress is the most popular and among the best CMS platform to help you create stunning websites. Today, WordPress powers about 30% websites and has touched heights since last few years. This platform provides some great options for creating a social network community.

BuddyPress: The topmost and the most popular plugin being BuddyPress. The best part about this plugin is its wide scope as well as it is completely free. BuddyPress lets you create a feature-full social network website and that too in minutes.
This plugin works with almost all WP themes. This plugin offers everything members to friends, chats, activities etc. a social networking site needs.

The best part about BuddyPress plugin is it’s completely free. The major features of this plugin can be :

• Private Messaging
• Activity Streams
• Discussion Forums and much more.
• User Groups
• Friend Connections
• Extended Profiles

Peepso: Peepso is a WordPress plugin that lets users create Social Network like community-based websites. This plugin is available in both free and premium version. Peepso has many features such as adding friends, deleting friends, private messaging etc.

It also provides options to add widgets for user’s photos, videos, and friends. One can easily place these widgets wherever he wishes to inside the theme.  It has three major additional plugins namely:

• PeepSo Moods
• PeepSo Tags
• PeepSo Location

Other ways to create Social Network Website

There are some other solutions other than WordPress as well that you can use for creating a social network website. Using a CMS will be the best option but these platforms can also help you in this regard:

Ning: Ning is a platform on which you can create your own social network. They provide you option to try out their service for 14 days for free after which you are billed according to the plan you will choose. Pricing starts at $25/month for only 1,000 members and rises to $99/month for 100,000 users. But this is not an open source platform and you cannot make any changes to its code.

JomSocial: JoMSocial is easy to use an addon that turns your Joomla CMS in a social networking site. This platform provides a complete social community with few clicks. It provides you options such as comments, Liking, Activity, Features Posts, Events, Social Sharing, Moderation etc.

Decide Yourself:

It is important to look at various factors before deciding on a social network platform that you think will be the best for you. Some major point that you need to consider are:
1. Open Source because there are many changes and enhancements that you need to do to create a perfect social community for yourself.
2. Cost simply because you need an affordable social network platform.
3. Updates because old and less updated platform makes a bad choice.
4. Support because at every step you need access to different docs and options available.

There are many options that you can choose from in order to create a social networking website. But among all these BuddyPress for WordPress stands out the best as it is open source, free and highly extendable.