Do you want to give your community members the ability to add hashtags just like Facebook on their BuddyPress powered social network? We all are aware of the power of hashtags on any social media website. They can serve as a major tool to drive huge traffic and engagement towards any social networking community. They also help in the easy categorization of posts that have been published.
But how can you integrate this feature on a BuddyPress social networking website? In today’s article, we will let you know how you can integrate hashtags feature on your BuddyPress website.
Importance Of Using Hashtags On Your BuddyPress Website
Hashtags can prove to be really useful in social media marketing. They can be used to promote a new product, a service or to make your content more popular in the community. Here are a few reasons why these hashtags are important for your social networking website.
1. Improve Content Reach:
Hashtags are a very important tool when it comes to expanding the reach of your site’s content. This is because any word preceded by a hashtag becomes a searchable link and can be used by others to search for a particular content thus promoting the reach of your content.
2. Grow Your Brand
If you are starting a new business or a new community website, using hashtags can be really beneficial for your community. When visitors will search for a particular hashtag that you have used on your community, they will find your community in the result for a particular hashtag.
3. Improves Your SEO:
Furthermore, hashtags can raise awareness, thus making your content viewed by more people than simply the ones who have joined your community. Hashtags can also add value to your site’s SEO and can drive huge traffic towards your website.
4. Stay Updated
Hashtags will also help your community members to stay updated about ongoing trends in your community. They can also follow certain hashtags and see posts related to that particular hashtag.
Integrating Hashtag On Your BuddyPress Website
Let us now move forward with integrating hashtags feature on your BuddyPress website. First, you will be required to install and activate BuddyPress hashtags plugin. This plugin is a premium BuddyPress add-on that allows you to add hashtags to any BuddyPress activity or bbPress topic. These hashtags turn into links and are used as search items based on topics.
To install this plugin, you can see this guide on How to install the plugin.
Once you have activated this plugin, you will be required to configure its General Settings by Dashboard> WB plugins> Hashtags The major settings of this plugin are:
- Minimum hashtag length which allows you to set a minimum length of a hashtag
- Maximum Hashtag length which allows you to set a maximum length of hashtag.
This plugin also allows you to show the most used community hashtags at the sidebar with the help of a widget. You can simply go to Dashboard >> Appearance >> Widgets >> Buddpress/bbPress hashtag and add the widget to the desired position. You can change the title of this widget as well as set a limit to how many hashtags you want to show in the widget. Furthermore, you can also sort the hashtags by name or by size and decide how to display them.
This plugin also allows you to add multi-language hashtags so you can add hashtags in your native language as well. You can see the plugin live in action here:
We hope you will now start using hashtags on your BuddyPress website. If you have any suggestions for us, let us know in the comments below.
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