It seems there are often just a handful of camps when it comes to utilizing social media to drive business: those who are crushing it with creativity and boundless engagement, those who view platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn as necessary evils, and even those companies who still think if they ignore it long and hard enough, it might go just away. The latter isn’t happening, so we decided to ask a golf industry professional who excels at the art and science of effective social media practices to give us all a few pointers on using these platforms to increase customer loyalty, deepen the culture of the club, educating the client base, driving revenue, and having fun in the process.
Katherine Walsh manages the social media at Towhee Club, a Bobby Jones Links operated property, located in Spring Hill, Tennessee. But she didn’t just start managing the club’s online videos, photos, and messages out of the blue. Her background was being an ESPN sideline reporter and a golf media correspondent, positions where she was already gaining social media traction and knowhow.
“I manage two different accounts here, for the course and the Birdsong Social restaurant,” she says. “And how I manage those accounts is different because I look at each as having its own personality. I really homed in on our ‘You’re a stranger here but once’ slogan at Towhee Club. We’re big on relationships. And Bobby Jones Links as a company, is really big on relationships, too. I’m a people person, and so I built relationships within the golf and restaurant sides and projected those personalities and made it into our social media platforms. Instead of posting ‘here’s a burger. You should buy this’ to boost revenue, I was advertising the food and the golf, but also the people and the personality of the club as a whole.”
The impact Walsh has been making on Towhee Club’s overall customer engagement through creative social media strategies is having a real impact. So far in 2024, Towhee Club’s reach on Instagram is up 494% year over year. And on Facebook, the club’s reach is up 131% year over year.
Walsh views social media as a way to develop a brand. “It’s really figuring out your niche in the industry, who you want to be, how you want to brand yourself, and how you want to be known,” says Walsh, whose other duties at the course include managing the marketing, working in the pro shop, helping coach the PGA Junior Leagues, assisting other pros with overseeing outside staff, and teaching adaptive golfers.
Instead of hitting a target number of social media posts, Walsh tries to make quality posts with clear-cut substance like “a really good reel (video) of our personality, good photos of the club, and a graphic. We try to have fun with it. We live in a world where things on social media are trending all the time, changing all the time, and it’s really hard to keep up with all those trends. You need to be your own brand, your own person, or in our case, our own club. I figure out what about our club makes it unique, and then transfer that on a social media level to our members, our audience, and to the people we are trying to attract. That really challenged me at first in having to manage the Birdsong Social. I have never been in the food and beverage industry before. It was an opportunity for me to brand the restaurant and its account, and also get to know the staff. So, I did more than just post pictures of food. Anyone could post a picture of a burger and say come eat this burger. But I really tried to capture the experience and the aesthetic behind the food because I looked at our location 35 minutes south of Nashville. It’s a big club where we get influencer traffic. We get the YouTuber traffic. We get the moms who are bloggers, and we get a lot of people who like to post pictures of what they’re eating and where they’re at. When I’m looking at somewhere I want to eat, not only do I look at the food, but I also look at the atmosphere and wonder if it’s a restaurant that I’m going to have to dress nicer for. Is it more casual? Do they have a place outside to eat? So, I started capturing those things. Not so much just the food, but more of the people that come in and what we have going on.”
Earlier this summer, for example, Birdsong Social staged live music on the patio. So instead of just posting ‘we have live music on the patio,’ Walsh posted a reel of the different performers, people eating al fresco, and the aura. “I wanted people to picture themselves here and show them that point of view of enjoying live music on the patio during happy hour,” she says. “That really helped drive traffic to the restaurant. For the golf side, we want people to come back. We turn certain staffers into personalities – having them do bits all the time on social media. And it’s funny because people come into the club and say they saw them on social media and ask for a picture with them. So now they’re coming for the golf, but also for the people and the merchandise.” One recent such video garnered 1.8 million views, 50,000 likes and 59,000 shares, and is still on the rise.
So far in 2024, Towhee Club Facebook page has racked up 1.25 million Impressions and gained nearly 400 new followers. Towhee Club’s Instagram account has had 1.25 million Impressions while picking up 550+ new followers. In that same time span, Birdsong Social’s Facebook page has accrued 89,518 Impressions while gaining more than 300 new followers. Birdsong Social’s Instagram page has 97,147 Impressions and has added over 200 new followers.
Walsh believes that courses should definitely use social media to help drive traffic to the facility. “It’s probably one of the most effective, if not the highest, marketing methods,” she says. “If your course is semi-private or public, or a private course with young professional members, you want to target the demographic of people that are younger who are on social media, because we’re all on social media and share posts, reels, you name it. Social media is a highly effective marketing tool because the majority of people have it at their fingertips.”
