Growing a thriving community that connects people both online and offline is key, especially for remote workers, digital nomads, and expats seeking real-life connections. This guide covers practical steps to define your audience, choose the right platforms, host engaging events, and empower your members to co-create lasting bonds. Plus, discover how Remotr can help you streamline community management and boost growth, so you don’t have to do it alone.
Image: Portimão Digital Nomad meetup (from Facebook)
It’s well known that growing an online and offline community can be challenging and takes time and effort. Hybrid communities are expected to become the norm, combining online and in person elements to reach a broad audience, while also maintaining and focussing on personal connections. This trend is especially drive by the increase in remote work, with the need to cater to different preferences. Remote workers are now more than ever looking for real life connections to improve their quality of life.
This guide is for community builders that have already created or want to create a community designed for remote workers, expats, and digital nomads. For those that are looking for ways to grow their community, while still being authentic and genuine with their audience.
Before you start building your community, it’s important to define your niche. Who is your community for? Who is your audience? Or is everyone allowed to join? Where do you want to start your community? Are you focussing on one specific city? Or multiple cities in one location?
The next step is to write down the struggles and problems of your audience. It’s well-known that remote workers and digital nomads struggle with loneliness and connecting with new people when arriving to a new place. This is a significant issue you can cater your community on.
Once you have a clear image on your niche and audience, you can start to build your community. This is when you can start thinking about what platforms you would like to use and how you will reach potential community members.
In the current tech era, there are plenty of platforms to use to build and grow your community in. It’s very important to research which platform is best for you and your audience. Write down the pros and cons of each platform and start working from there. WhatsApp is one of the best options to start out with your community, since it is free and loads of people are already using it. With the new community feature, it makes it even easier to start out.
Since you are also going to host real life events, Whatsapp has their limits, so you definitely should look into other platforms to help you out. An easy one would be Facebook, where you can post events and your members can easily join.
There are also many other platforms on the rise to manage your community or host events. We all know platforms like meet-up, but these aren't always the best onces for the end user. There are many limitations and an early pay wall, which will decrease the user experience.
Since there are so many platforms that all have their own purpose and audience, it can be a full-time job to manage all these platforms without burning out. If you want to learn more about great solutions for this issue, keep on reading!
One of the most important things, while building and growing a community, is staying consisted and engage as much as possible in real life. People love consistently and knowing what to expect. Think about recurring events like weekly coworking days, social meetups or monthly hiking trips. This makes it easier for you as the organizer, for your community, or for the people that recently joined.
To make people feel welcome, personally invite new members to meet-ups, ask every new member to introduce themselves, but also encourage people to create their own events and activities to connect with the community. You don't have to do it alone!
Everyone is on social media these days, so it’s a great platform to engage with your community and a place where potential new members can find you as well. Use social platforms to build anticipation and keep momentum going. Share information about upcoming events, use polls to know the interest of the community, and send people invites to events.
After the event, make sure to share photo’s and video’s of the success of your event/community. Tag active community members, so they can share your content as well and reach a new audience. Another important factor of sharing visuals of your events is for, (potential) members to know what to expect of the meetups and get excited about joining the community and attending following events. When people see the success of the meetups, they are more likely to join the next time.
The popular FOMO (fear of missing out) concept, is also coming into effect if you are using social media properly. So you should definitely make use of this concept and keep this in mind.
Tip: share real, genuine content on social media. Everyone is using AI these days, so people are more then every interested in connecting with real people and real content.
Growing and managing a community takes a lot of effort, but please remember, you don't have to it all alone. Empower your member to create and grow the community with you. Give them a shoutout when they co-create to make them feel valued. Let your community come up with event idea’s, but also let them host these events themselves. Furthermore, you can let your community decided on next events, by collecting their opinions. You can easily use polls (WhatsApp or Instagram Stories) or send out very short surveys (Google Forms).
A key point of creating a safe environment is to share the community guidelines and rules of the group. Everyone needs to feel safe and respected, so make sure it is clear to everyone what the community stands for and how you expect people to communicate within the community.
This is most likely not the most fun and interesting part of growing and managing your community, but it is important so you know what is working and where you can improve. What do you keep track of? What are you missing? Are your members active? Why are people not engaging or attending the events?
Here are some tips on important metrics, you should definitely write down as a community builder:
Next significant thing is, ask for feedback! Don’t try to come up with all the information yourself, use your community to collect information and improve. Send out surveys, share polls on socials and ask for one on one feedback. There are plenty of options to measure the success of your community and get to the information on how you can improve.
These are action steps for measuring your community, but you can also use Instagram/Facebook analytics to see if your community is growing and what content is working. Make sure to create a professional Instagram account, so you can look into the professional dashboard, where you can see loads of metrics that can help you out.
Tip: How to improve your Instagram bio, so people can find you
Start with the name of your community (eg. ‘CITY’ digital nomads or expats or remote workers
Define yourself as a community
Pro tip: create a link tree (free) so people can go to your important links (website, WhatsApp community, link to next event etc.).
Why is essential to have a good bio? So people can find you and if people find other communities in your area, they will most likely be directed to your community as well via the ‘ suggested for you’ tab.
And the most essential of it all, you don't have to do this alone! Are you struggling to managing your community via all the different platforms? At Remotr we are here to help you start and grow your local community with ease.
At Remotr we help local communities
If you want to learn how we can help you, feel free to reach out to as by sending an email to info@goremotr.com or send us a direct message on Instagram
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