Engaging with an audience using social media

One of the most important topics for Golf Course Operators is marketing and communications. Golf Clubs have many moving pieces and keeping your marketing up to date is crucial for your success. You might be really good at applying a few marketing tactics such as website communications, event promotions, and/or club fitting events, however, owners, general managers, and head golf professionals wear so many hats that it is very difficult to keep track of marketing and technology trends.

Since you are in charge of increasing member engagement and sales in your golf course/club, it is important for you to use social media and leverage its power and reach. Do you know the best practices for social media?

Social Media Best Practices

Be concise: First of all, your post should be short and informative. Nowadays, human attention spans are very short. Your members and new customers are bombarded every day with promotions, ads and posts from other brands. So, it is crucial for you to stay relevant and spark online conversations.

Be relevant: Secondly, you want to make sure that your post is relevant and you are speaking about trendy topics within your industry, your region or your country. Part of your job as a golf course operator is to make sure that your posts are providing value to your members.

Include CTAs: You want to make sure that your social media posts include a clear Call to Action or a link, so that your followers know exactly what to do after they see your post. Think about the type of action you want them to do – visit your website, book a tee time, RSVP to an event, sign up to your newsletter? 

Include eye-catching media: Nowadays, it's very difficult to get people’s attention. With so much content being shared online, your members make fast decisions around the content they want to see or engage with, so make sure to share relevant content with eye-catching images or videos. In the golf industry we have the advantage that we are promoting a life-style and experience with our golf course therefore we can post beautiful images of our course and people playing in it.

Marketing TIP: Invest in a good golf course photographer. They will provide you with beautiful images of your club that you will be able to use in your website as well as in social media channels. This will help you increase awareness of your course and create trust among your followers.

We had a client run a contest for the “Best Photo” with a trial membership as the reward.  Submissions were gathered, under the recognition that submitting a high resolution photo included a release for use of each photo in future marketing.  Results were excellent, new photos were high impact and the new trial member converted into a full member too.

Using Stories

A story is a brief and short piece of content shared on your social media channels, so it’s important to understand it will have a short lifespan. A story could be used to share a future or current event, user generated content, alerts, news or share short pieces of information about your club. Let's walk through some of the best practices for creating an optimal story.

• It is important to know that every platform has native tools that are available to edit your stories. Be sure to fully take advantage of them and explore the different options such as filters, stickers, etc. available to you.
• You can diversify your story's content by posting videos, photos, and Boomerangs to keep it exciting.
• You can use “@mentions” to mention other users within your story. For example, if you would like to highlight a business partner, you can tag them in your story. If you partner decides to re-share your content, it will gain more reach, i.e people that are not currently following your business or aware of your club will have a chance to be exposed to it.
• Include a Call-to-Action link to drive traffic from your story to a landing page. This could help you generates new leads, create awareness of a promotion / event happening, and keep track of the channels that are driving more traffic to your website.

Video Best Practices

3 Seconds rule: First, you can increase video views by grabbing attention in the first three seconds. Your members attention is limited, so it's important to showcase your key message in the first few seconds. This will help your video viewers to have a clear idea of what they are about to watch and if it is interesting enough, they will stay until the end of your video.

Sound Off Alternatives:  Since many are watching this content on cellphones and in working environments, the majority of people have their sound off. So, if you are communicating the main idea of your video within the first 3 seconds, how do you make your point clear? - The answer is to create closed captions subtitles and/or screen text.

Be mobile friendly: The majority of people open and scroll through their social media channels using their cellphones or tablets. Therefore, it is important to align and create your videos in a way that is mobile friendly. Normally, if you are recording videos for tv or computer, you will use a 16:10 or 4:3 aspect ratio, however since we want to be mobile friendly, you need to start creating videos in 1:1 (square) or 9:16 (vertical). For your information recording videos in a vertical orientation will help you post content for Instagram and Facebook stories.

“Live” videos: You can use “Live" videos to share live events, and/or tournaments happening at your club. These types of videos add a greater sense of urgency since the video will disappear in 24 hours (depending on the channel you are using).

What Are Hashtags?

A hashtag starts with the number sign “#” followed by a word or a phrase. Hashtags are usually used to categorize your content topic and add keywords to it, allowing users to find or follow conversations of interest of them.  Hashtags are good for you to use because they increase brand recognition, and expand your content reach. 

Marketing Tip: The more hashtags you add to your post, the more keywords you are using to index your content in social media and therefore creates more visibility and reach. In case you want to add more than four hashtags we recommend you to hide your hashtags within your post. You can do this by adding line breaks into your caption and including your hashtags at the end of your post. This technique will make your post cleaner and less spammy.

Hashtag Best Practices

Don’t use spaces or punctuation: Do not add spaces or punctuation in your hashtags because it keeps them from being searchable on the social media platform you are using.

• Good Example: #GolfCourse
• Wrong Example: #Golf Course / #Golf.Course

Capitalize hashtags: Capitalize your hashtags will help you improve readability of your keywords.

Do not overuse hashtags: Avoid using too many hashtags in a single post. We advise you to use no more than 10, however this number may vary depending on the topic of your post

Research and use popular hashtags: First do a research about the most popular and engaging hashtags within your industry. For example, one of the most popular hashtags in Instagram is #TBT or #ThroughBackThursday. This hashtag will help you showcase the past of your club and your experience building long-lasting memories with your club members.

Create branded hashtags: If you want to increase your Golf Club brand recognition on a platform, it may be useful to create a hashtag that's branded. This best practice will help you to be more visible within a social media channel and it’s something unique to your club. It could be your company name, tagline, a marketing /sales campaign, an event name, or something else that's meant to drive participation and engagement.

For more information, please contact:

Total e Integrated

Total e Integrated is a leading provider of end-to-end business management solutions for recreation, retail, hospitality and community organizations. For over 20 years Total e Integrated has helped organizations to integrate departments, automate marketing, streamline operations and boost revenues with our innovative solutions and expert consulting services team.

Lance Merrihew
707-779-2592

Lance@totaleintegrated.com

www.totaleintegrated.com