On this month’s Evolve with Envida, we’re going to discuss how to cultivate your community both locally and online.
What You’ll Learn:
- How to identify your community
- Cultivating partnerships
- Engagement best practices
How Do You Identify Your Community?
Odds are you’ve either already identified your target audience or you have a good idea of who your audience is going to be. You want to focus here on who you’re trying to reach to help shape your community.
Questions to ask yourself:
- Is my audience going to be interacting with people around the same age group and demographic?
- Is my audience going to be interacting with local event pages and restaurants?
You want to think about who your audience is following and interacting with online to decide who your property is going to be interacting with online. You want to stay local — look to your neighbors, businesses, shops, vendors, and restaurants.
How to Cultivate Partnerships
Online Engagement:
Online engagement includes liking, commenting, and sharing — basically interacting with, and showing support for local businesses. This helps not only build the relationship between you and the businesses but also helps your target audience see you interacting with those in your neighborhood.
User-generated (UGC):
This is a fantastic way to utilize photography from others to help showcase your area. What you’re doing here is requesting permission to use somebody else’s photo on your feed. You must request permission, then you’ll provide credit to the original poster on your feed. UGC is also a great way to break up photography and showcase a more humanized lifestyle on your grid.
Hashtags:
Using hyperlocal hashtags and keywords is going to help your profile be more searchable and help people in your neighborhood find you. When users are searching for a certain keyword, you want to make sure your profile is one of the first to come up.
Collaboration Posts:
These allow for mutual exposure for both you and your neighbors. How collaboration posts work — you post a photo and then you request to collaborate with somebody. If they accept, your photo will be posted on both your feed and your neighbor’s feed. These types of posts receive great engagement and, again, allow for mutual exposure.
Tagging:
Tagging your neighbors on posts helps increase engagement and exposure. Say you’re having an event — if you’re in a partnership with a local restaurant or vendor for catering, tagging them in the event posts can lead to them sharing the post to their feed, resulting in the post getting exposed to their audience.
