Following up on our featured tips highlighting music, mobile, photo sharing, and video sharing, let’s talk about groups. Groups promote discussion and sharing for your members, privately or publicly, with conversations under member control. A tool that naturally organizes members by topics, interests or friendships, groups offer advanced functionality such as event creation, unique admin tools such as messaging all members, custom privacy options, group “officers” for moderation, and more.
Zowned used our custom settings to rename groups as “clans”, and Zowned members join these clans to socialize and organize with their videogame friends. Active group members may spend most of their time within groups; sharing photos, commenting on the latest news, connecting with old friends and making new ones. Depending on your community, this may be exactly what you want, and as the site owner you determine how members use groups and what functions are available. Sometimes content is best for the main activity feed, and other times content deserves more discussion and thought in smaller, focused groups. Have questions about realizing your idea with groups? Contact us, and we’ll be happy to help you create the community you desire.
As always, our third-party development community has Group Plugin specific add-ons available. Here are some that may catch your interest: Using predefined criteria, you can have members auto join groups with this add-on SocialEngine-Expert. WebHive released an add-on for Question and Answer functionality within groups. YouNet has an Advanced Group add-on that adds extra features to our standard Group Plugin such as group email, and invitation tool, and more. Members can share documents within groups using an add-on by SocialEngineAddOns, and they also offer an add-on that adds poll functionality to groups.
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