There are some of the best social network tools presented in the following, with which webmasters can set up the online communities easily and successfully. With the huge development of forum and discussion board, more and more people are wishing to set up a community on the web to attract counterparts within the same niche for ideal exchange and communication. Some people, especially young webmasters, simply want to build a platform that allows registers to make friends with strangers on the Internet.
Whatever your goal is, the first step to get a community started is finding a user-friendly and powerful social network tool. As you may feel confused to choose among a large collection, we have listed the top options in the following, which narrows down the selection to the largest extent.
Best Social Network Tools
All of the following recommendations are easy-to-use without steep learning curve. This means even newbies who use the software for the first time can get used to its operation within a short time. In addition, these tools are definitely powerful and rich-featured that can fully meet your needs.
- Pligg – This is an open source tool that can be downloaded and used for free. By building a community with Pligg, you can invite visitors to register on your website. Thus, they can post content and connect with other registers with ease. It is worth mentioning that this software is very easy to handle, which can start your online network platform in minutes.
- Elgg – This tool has been utilized by many groups and individuals to create their own online discussion boards. The industry range is wide enough that includes education, business, real estate, charity, technology, sports, and many more. Therefore, if you are going to run a large forum with a professional tool for your group, Elgg is a good choice.
- Oxwall – As compared with other tools listed in this award, Oxwall is the most flexible one. With some in-built plugins, you can change the way it works with ease. All of these plugins are functional than can be used for different purposes, meaning that you can add a lot of new features to your community without any hassle.
- Dolphin – Dolphin can be regarded as one of the most advanced community tools. It is open source, flexible, customizable, and rich-featured, helping users set up an online community with ease. Besides, you can add a wide variety of contents into the site, such as videos, music, video chat, mailbox, app, and image gallery, etc.
- Etano – This social network tool is mainly used to set up a dating site for registered users to make friends with each other. Due to its high flexibility, however, some other webmasters also use this tool to build some unprofessional discussion board and female related forum.
- PeoplePods – PeoplePods is undoubtedly a developer-friendly toolkit used to build an online social networking. It offers a flexible infrastructure that allows website members to publish content, to post comments, and to interact with other users easily and quickly.
- Jcow – This is another quality and flexible community tool that is written in PHP and MySQL. With its easy-to-understand user interface, users can set up a forum within minutes and handle the site with no hassle. In addition, by utilizing its rich features, users can build a communication site that is as powerful as Facebook and Twitter.
- Beatz – This online social networking script can help you start a social dating site with ease. Written in PHP with the architecture of MVC, this tool is secure, lightweight, and powerful. It comes with more than 29 native plugins and is based on the pH7Core framework, meaning that users can extend the functionality and customize the website appearance as they wish.
Summary
To be honest, all of these tools are worth trying. You only need to select one that can meet your needs the most, then you are able to get the community started with little effort.
In addition to the social network tools, we also have recommended the top 3 related web hosting companies. After all, the hosting service is also important for website building. For online community, the reliability and page loading speed are undoubtedly important, so the following companies are all able to guarantee an excellent hosting performance. In addition, their packages are definitely affordable, coming with rich features and responsive technical support.