Recently I came across with PGA.com's Facebook brand page. While I analyzed this brand page, I was thinking about the goals and obejctives of it. What I know from my work that companies are launching brand pages for many reasons. Here are the 5 main reasons:
- Grow a brand community of loyalists and advocates;
- Extend your brand into the social life of your customers;
- Extend the relevant reach of your communication;
- Build reputation and trust via conversations;
- Build brand preference, loyalty and action through relevant
engagement
"The PGA of America is the world's largest working sports organization. It is the official organization of golf professionals who are the recognized experts in growing, teaching and managing the game of golf, while serving millions of people throughout its 41 PGA Sections nationwide." (source: www.pga.com)
At the same time when I am talking about PGA of America we should not mix up it with PGA Tour which is another organization with far better social media performance (KPI: number of followers, referrals etc.). Just on Twitter PGA Tour has 19,423 followers. PGA.com has 4,336 followers on Twitter and 14,904 fans in their Facebook brand page.
For first and second and many sights this brand page looks like a selfish and not engaging brand page. It talks only about itself and not with us. This is not engaging and definitely not driving action. PGA of America can be grateful those ardent golf players who joined this brand page. Among them myself, but for professional interests.
This brand page would be useful if:
- it would host discussions and provide useful resources (see above 4.: reputation and trust)
- invite fans to upload contents
- provide branded materials that are useful in PGA professionals' everyday life (see above 2.: extend the brand into customers' social life)
I hope PGA of America did not created this brand page due to Tiger Woods' scandals. The real challenge is how we can make golf attractive to the next generation where Wii, Farmville (on Facebook) and extreme sports are more fascinating then putting a small white ball in to a hole.
Finally, if PGA of America will not insert some action into this page (e.g.Providing applications
that drive purchases or donations; and applications that enlist ambassadors etc.) then it will be really waste of money and fans will get bored.