Summary
The research makes use of data analytics to explore aspects of the social media profile of an international golf society.
The Donald Ross Society and Golf
Jake Barrett University of Edinburgh
The Donald Ross Society was founded in 1989, primarily to commemorate Donald J. Ross and his historic role as the designer of over 400 courses in the USA. The society’s mission is to collect, curate, and disseminate information about the role of Donald Ross in golf’s history, the courses he designed, and best practices for maintaining and restoring them.
Closely related to this, the Donald Ross Society also aims to promote the role of the Royal Dornoch Golf Club in Donald Ross’ story and create a wider “Historian Network” of club members involved in the preservation of course stories, histories, and cultural knowledge that could otherwise be lost.
The Society thus has an important role in both safeguarding the cultural legacy of the sport and strengthening cultural and sporting ties between Scotland and the rest of the world, especially the USA.
As the Society turns 35, golf is at a critical turning point and is becoming more popular than ever around the world. This popularity is particularly apparent in the USA and among audiences that golf has traditionally struggled to attract – young, female, and non-white .
As well as an increase in those playing the sport, there has been a huge spike in online interest in the sport as captured by the #GolfTok community on TikTok. There are 682.8K posts mentioning #GolfTok, with some gaining millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes.
Such a wide audience provides space for more niche interests in specific aspects of golf that are especially relevant to the Donald Ross Society: there are 2136 posts mentioning #golfcoursearchitecture.
In this growing online environment, the Donald Ross Society has representation across various social media channels:
• Facebook (DonaldRossSociety): 151 likes, 181 followers, last post 06/01/2022
• Twitter/X (@donaldrosssocie): 3159 followers, roughly one post per month (mainly retweets), several mentions per week
• Instagram (donaldrosssociety): 1337 followers, 10 posts (last post 10/05/2023, 103 likes, 6 comments)
• TikTok: despite no official presence, specific Donald Ross-related posts from other accounts gain traction
In general, Facebook captures an older audience, while Twitter/X, Instagram and TikTok represent more dynamic, youthful audiences (in decreasing age order and increasing audience size order).
Two factors in the Donald Ross Society’s online presence are important to emphasise here. The first is that the older market, broadly represented by Facebook, is not captured by the Society’s activities on the platform, with a size comparable to a fan-operated account.
The second is that activities on the more relevant platforms are prioritised in the opposite order that an active pursuit of younger followers would recommend.
The most established legacy platform, Twitter/X, has the most posts and activity, followed by Instagram, with seemingly no activity at all on TikTok. Given the amount of golf-related content on the latter platforms, it appears the hierarchy of platforms prioritised by the Society is out of step with the hierarchy of interest in golf, particularly among younger audiences.
