We all know that WordPress is a great tool for creating a website. It’s much more than a blog platform, it is an essential tool for anyone that wants a website that is easy to maintain and update. But as an essential marketing tool for social networks, a lot of added features for WordPress often get overlooked or ignored entirely. We’ve got some great plugins that can be leveraged easily in any social marketing campaign.

The key to get the word out about your website this day in age is posting about it on social networks. For every social network out there, someone has created a cross posting tool in WordPress. Our current favourites are the MySpace, Twitter and Facebook plugins, that take any post you put on your WordPress website and posts about it on the respective Social Network.

And of course, you want to make sure that your fans and readers have a chance to do the same thing. Check out the Sociable plugin- it makes it a snap to tell anyone and everyone about one of your web pages. It automatically supports Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Email, Facebook and lots of others. Its like the swiss army knife of social bookmarks.

Once you’ve got the word out, you’ll need to take advantage of the social aspects of social networks. If you just cross post your WordPress site without having an extensive list of friends you won’t be taking advantage of the social media platforms. Finding and adding friends can be time consuming. But it can go by a lot faster with the Yoono plugin for FireFox.

And of course, while we’re talking about social networking and WordPress, we might as well return to WordPress MU, also known as WordPress MultiUser, the version of WordPress that lets multiple blogs be hosted on the same website. Automatic, the creators of WordPress and WordPress MU just bought BuddyPress, a plugin that turns WordPress MU into a full fledged Social Network. This means that future versions of WordPress MU will contain all the stuff that BuddyPress added in, giving your WordPress install all the power of MySpace of Facebook.