Golf Equipment Industry in social media (part 2)


By: August 31, 2009


As last I wrote, I am trying to discover how golf equipment industry are performing in social media particularly in Facebook, Twitter and blogs. In my study I checked the following brands: Ben Hogan, Benross, Callaway, Cleveland, Cobra, FootJoy, Forgan, John Letters, MacGregor, Mizuno, Nickent, Nike Golf, OdysseyGolf, Ping, Pinnaclegolf, Scotty Cameron, Snake Eyes, Srixon, TaylorMade, Titleist and Wilson Staff. Let's start with Facebook:

FACEBOOK

The best performing golf equipment brand is Titleist (user name on Facebook: Titleist (consumer product). Currently, the brand page has 19353 members. The page provides to its members photos, videos and useful links about the product. Such content can give reasons to return many times within a day and a result of it, Titleist can have a favorable relationship with its customers and develop a very positive image.

Titleist in Facebook

The KPIs in social media communication is how much followers, members you have and how many comments you have on your page. As we can see on the picture, Titleist is on the right track. Other promising brand site belongs to FootJoy. Although the content of the brand page is less impressive than Titleist's, but a good start, with over 10K members.

TWITTER

Here is a big competition between Nike Golf and Titleist. Titleist is the leader with 3 accounts. The most popular Titleist account has 4670 followers (the second most popular Titleist account is TitleistonTour: 3703 followers, the third TitleisCares: 735 followers). This shows me how Titleist is segmenting his customers and how he wants to meet the expectations. If this is part of their image building efforts to develop an image of a market leader then they are on the right way. As I said, Nike Golf is performing well. At this moment it has "only" 4155 followers. Callaway is represented in Twitter with 2 profiles: Callaway (3912 followers) and FromTheTee (3204 followers). OdysseyGolf is on the right track, but needs to work on having more followers.

To my surprise Mizuno said on his forum website that they do not want to start a Twitter account.

Only 6 brands from my list have some kind of blog: Cobra, FootJoy, Forgan, Pinnaclegolf, Scotty Cameron and Titleist. In this category, Titleist blog was the most professional as it socializes the content via Facebook, Twitter applications and links in addition to newsletter subscriptions.