Do you need a handy man who can hang that heavy mirror over the sofa in your living room?
Did a cute kitty wander up to your front door without a collar?
Did you just buy a new home with a pond and you’re wondering how to maintain it?
Did you spot a bobcat or mountain lion in your yard?
Is your sprinkler system on the fritz?
Every so often we need to exchange information with our neighbors because they “get it” — they live here too.
Although it seems like a nifty idea, you can’t really roam the neighborhood with a megaphone shouting, “I need a reliable plumber!” or “I just saw a snake! Who can tell me that quote about ‘red touch yellow, kill a fellow?!?'”
This is when social media networks and Facebook groups for neighborhoods come in handy.
A popular website that spans the Lake Travis area is Nextdoor, a free private social media network for neighborhoods. When you sign up, you join based on your specific neighborhood, so it’s an immediate information highway to your immediate neighbors.
For example, if you live in The Hills of Lakeway and join, you’ll be online with 415 neighbors who can post in various categories like classifieds, crime and safety, free items, general, recommendations and lost and found. It also gives you the ability to connect with 1,272 nearby neighbors in close proximity to The Hills, as well as local agencies.
Pros and cons
The pros are it can be very helpful when you have a specific need within your neighborhood. For example, let’s say your child found a Lamb Chop squeaky toy on the street and desperately wants to return it to its canine owner. Well, Nextdoor is a great place to post a pic with a description. It’s perfect for referrals and reporting lost pets too.
The cons are just like any cons with social media — annoying things that don’t really need to be posted are posted. And if you sign up for alerts, you’ll see all of them. Let’s just say Nextdoor posts are akin to Lakeway Swap or Craigslist posts in that they can be er … uhm … amusing. Do people really post these things?!? Yes, evidently they do.
Speaking of complaints, when you’re feeling gripe-y there’s a Facebook page called Lakeway Gripes (& Grins) with about 1,600 members. This closed group is for “members of the Lakeway, Dripping Springs and surrounding communities to share business/services reviews, complain about traffic, rant and rave about Lakeway or whatever is on your mind.”
That being said, if you’d like to gush about the sheer awesomeness of something in the Lake Travis area, you can do that too; hence the “grins” component.
Feeling neighborly instead?
Well, there are lots of Facebook groups for people who live in Lake Travis that we mentioned for the first time back in 2014. Due to the growth and popularity of these groups, some of them are closed now, so you have to ask to join.
From running meetup groups to boating groups to selling youth cleats (because Sweetpeas doesn’t sell cleats!), there are plenty of ways to interact with your neighbors.
What’s your favorite spot for communicating with your Lake Travis peeps? Let us know in the comments on Facebook!
