By Shane Reynolds
As a young Club, we are often challenged on the best practices to promote Club events, facility hours and activities with our membership. For the past several years, we have put an emphasis on using social media as one avenue to promote events and activities. We also utilize email as the primary means of communicating with our membership. We encourage all of our members to follow our social media sites, read their Club emails and log onto the Club website. To date, the Club has 99 percent of our primary members’ email addresses which enables us to communicate in a fast and efficient way. Over the years, our staff has been energized by a flow of youth who are savvy in developing and utilizing technology and social media to better promote and communicate with our members. The benefit for a private Club to integrate our marketing with social media sites is that we closer align our members who utilize these sites with the lifestyle the Club provides.
The question we (Club management) often ask ourselves these days is whether this is the right approach for our Club demographics, while continually learning how we can get our message out to our members. We also have to consider and utilize these tools for prospective Club members and real estate buyers in Cordillera Ranch. Inevitably, there must be a following on these sites in order for them to be effective.
Facebook is a great way to communicate with active members of the Club as most people who are active on Facebook will have a couple hundred friends that they can tell about Club activities. Facebook is a quick and effective way for the Club to post photos of events and results of tournaments. Our members can also post photos, videos and links on the page as well.
The Club has a page on Facebook and, to date, has 1,313 people following the page. To keep the page fresh, we continue to post current and daily events while trying to create some compelling content so our members or prospective members will continue to visit the page. Cordillera Ranch Development and Real Estate have a page as well with 2,785 followers.
Instagram is a photo and video sharing platform where users can upload and share images. To date, The Clubs of Cordillera Ranch has 1,727 followers. If you are a fan of photography and enjoy looking at wonderful images from around the globe, download the app, get signed up and enjoy! Find the Club at “The Clubs of Cordillera Ranch.”
This is the most challenging to utilize with our members. It takes a bit more time for the Club and our members to develop communication via Twitter. On the Club’s end, we must not think of Twitter as a sales tool, but rather an indirect source of information on Club business, events and activities that generate leads and interest in the content posted to Twitter. The key is for the Club to follow relevant people within the club industry while adding value to our members and prospective members who follow. http://twitter.com/CordilleraRanch
Different people will utilize different means to gather information from the Club or from Cordillera Ranch. We certainly understand many of our members or residents will simply not utilize social media as part of their relationship with the Club or ranch, but that will not deter us from utilizing these resources to continue our efforts to market both the Club and real estate as well as developing communication tools to better serve our respective clients.
Shane Reynolds is the Director of Recreation at The Clubs of Cordillera Ranch. He can be reached at outfitter@cordilleraranch.com or 210.616.6051.
