How to Best Use Social Media to Explore Neighborhoods

Choosing a city to live in can be easy, but it can be a little more difficult to narrow it down to a neighborhood.

Without leaving your couch, however, you can explore a neighborhood through these three social media sites on a computer or with smartphone apps:

Facebook
Facebook’s City Guides are a hidden feature that can help you find places in a neighborhood where locals go. It’s like an insider’s guide to the best kept secrets of a local area.

To find it on the website, search for “City Guides Facebook” or “City Guides” and the name of the city you want to explore. On the mobile app, open the Explore tab and look for City Guides.

Scroll to the section “Places The Locals Go” and you’ll see restaurants, cafes and other attractions that locals rate highly on Facebook. Upcoming events and popular attractions can also be viewed.

If you have Facebook friends who have visited the city or live there, their names will be listed. Reach out to them for more neighborhood tips.

Instagram
The Places tab will help you get a visual feel for neighborhoods from photos that have been tagged with a location. When typing in a search on a desktop computer or on the mobile app, look for “Places” on the far right.

Also called geotagging, Instagram gives you photos of areas that may have been added only seconds ago. Search for a city under Places and you’ll see an almost never-ending stream of photos of the community and people who live there.

Twitter
Advanced Search in Twitter will help you find hyper-local blogs, news sources and people passionate about what’s happening in their neighborhood.

To get to it, click on “Search Filters” after doing a search, then click on “Advanced Search.”

Type in the name of the community you want to explore to see what’s happening now or very recently. You can also look in the News and Photos tabs for updates.

Advanced Search can also be used to find recent posts from people who live in the city you’re looking at, possibly for tips on what locals are doing in their neighborhoods.

I hope you found this helpful. Contact me for more home and real estate insights and info.