If you’re from Fort Collins, it’s not unlikely that you go out to eat often. (Don’t we have the highest number of restaurants per capita?).

And if you go out to eat often, you’ve probably heard of “Feasting Fort Collins”. (If none of those things are true, well…you’re missing out.)

It’s really too bad if you haven’t because “Feasting Fort Collins” is a fantastic example of what a thriving online community should look like and a great object lesson in how to grow and maintain one.

Just in case, let me start off with a quick overview.

A Hyperlocal Blog
Feasting Fort Collins is a hyperlocal food blog, meaning that the content is focused solely on reviews for Fort Collins. It was established in 2009, and provides the community with non-biased reviews of locally owned restaurants.

Introducing the Blogger
Kristin Mastre is the one and only Community Manager and Food Blogger for Feasting Fort Collins. For a one woman show, her community is pretty much what we’d hope for everyone. (But trust me, she has put A LOT of work into it.)

As you can see from the review of food truck, The Waffle Lab, she does a great job of integrating story telling with creativity and provides readers with great images. (This review was a 5 star and we agreed with it. We really LOVE grabbing lunch from The Waffle Lab food truck.)

Kristin has written well over 500 reviews on this particular blog over the past three years, all the while managing the online community she has built from scratch.

Building Community Takes Work
From her past experiences in blogging (in the early 2000s she had her own parenting blog AND nutrition blog), Kristin learned quickly how important it is to manage your online community.

“I realized the importance of community management through blogging. I remember there were tons of comments on my posts. I learned how to handle positive and negative feedback, how to keep the conversations going, how to manage crazy people without going crazy myself…That was my first time dealing with internet “trolls”.”

That experience was how Kristin came to understand that community management is a full time job and that it requires a specific skill set.

A Community Manager’s Schedule
Although her main focus is providing reviews for her readership through her food blog, Kristin also has to manage the thriving community her blog has attracted.

She publishes 3 types of posts a week:

1. Eat of the Week, a community-oriented newsletter, which has interviews, questions, and editorials,
2. A review of a local restaurant, and
3. Sunday Table Talk newsletter, which covers a lot of different topics

Kristin isn’t a fan of tools that help push out content (she’d rather share than push), so she manually posts on Facebook and Twitter immediately after a review goes live. She also posts her reviews on Yelp, Urbanspoon, and Pinterest.

She spends about an hour a day conversing on various platforms, sometimes more depending on the day.

Also, as a food blogger she checks into Foursquare and at times, she has had her readers tweet at her because they were there, too. She’ll meet up with her readers in-real-life and spend the time chatting. This creates community conversation. Can you say win?

Feasting Fort Collins Social Outlets
Feasting Fort Collins on Facebook:

With over 2,500 “liking” the blog’s Facebook page, and more than 100 people talking about it, it’s obvious that she is doing something right.

On Twitter it’s not much different:

She’s been on Twitter for about 3 years… if you average out her tweets per year, it’s about 8 tweets a day. If you’re currently active on Twitter, you know that is a pretty good number of tweets! Talk about activity and engagement.

Who The Blog Reaches
Through the web marketing tools we use,  we can see that even though Kristin’s blog is focused on Fort Collins’ restaurants, her reach goes farther than even she knew. For instance, through Twitter, she is able to capture international attention:

Not surprisingly, the highest number of her followers are in Colorado, but when we take a closer look at the US, it’s pretty clear that she has built a decent following throughout the country.

Because her target audience is in Fort Collins, it’s only natural that the majority of her community is right here in good ol’ Northern Colorado.

(Though let’s be clear that this is just people who follow her on Twitter. She has 1000 more followers on Facebook).

A Community Isn’t Built Overnight
The Feasting Fort Collins community is one that has been fed and nurtured for several years. One of the most difficult things for Kristin is learning how to balance the time commitment for managing her community and balancing everything else.

“People need to be realistic. It’s not 5 minutes here or 10 minutes there,” remarks Kristin ruefully on her community building activity.

But she also shares how worthwhile it is. “I started blogging when I was pregnant with my first son to keep a journal of my motherhood experiences and as a way to share those with family out-of-state. After he was born, I realized that I could work from home by blogging and started a business blog that made income. It all snowballed from there!”

“The most rewarding experience has been developing true friendships with some readers over time. I’ve gained some of my dearest friends in life who started out as readers commenting on reviews.”

Kristin understands that in order to get a 100% return on all of her hard work, she also needs to put in 100%. Every community – hers included - takes time to build and she had to foster it by being consistent with content, engagement, and real-life meetings.

Kristin was gracious enough to share her visit statistics. As you can see starting way back in 2010, her consistency was the driving force behind her community growth’s  steady climb.

You can also see what happened when that consistency started to decline.

Consistency and Transparency Matter
Kristin is quite open with her readership, so in July of 2012, when her eldest son began having some health problems, Kristin let her community know about it and told everyone that she was putting her family first.

You can see that there are a few months where the traffic to her site was down, but because she was transparent, and still writing, the community didn’t leave her altogether. And when she announced that things were looking up for her kiddo, her engagement bounced back and her website became more popular than ever.

The Moral of the Thriving Community Story Is…
There are three important things to take away from Kristin’s story about building a thriving community:

It takes time.
It takes skills.
It takes consistency.

Feasting Fort Collins does a great job fostering its online community; there is no doubt that you can, too.

I encourage you to take a look at your own community. Are you providing valuable content? Do you comment back to people who post-retweet-plus one-share your stuff? Are you writing about the things your community wants and needs?