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As LIV Golf star Bryson DeChambeau continues to dominate the golf genre on YouTube, the PGA Tour is pushing its own stars to expand their brands on social media.
“We are heavily encouraging them at the board level and through our player relations team to say, ‘You, player X, your audience could be significantly bigger the more you put yourself out there,’” PGA Tour senior VP of media Chris Wandell said during the most recent edition of The FOS Interview.
DeChambeau has gone viral with multiple episodes of his “Break 50” series, where he tries to shoot an 18-hole score lower than 50 with a celebrity guest, as well as his recent 16-day social media challenge of trying to hit a hole-in-one over his house in Texas.
Several PGA Tour golfers have created big personas online, like Max Homa roasting amateurs’ golf swings on X, and Min Woo Lee’s wacky videos on Instagram and TikTok. Despite often having millions of followers on social media, the majority of professional golfers—no matter what tour they play on—remain reserved when it comes to the public sphere. “It’s really on the players to kind of be themselves on social media,” said Wandell.
“These players are their own businesses,” he said. “They all have their own sponsor deals, their own time off the golf course to make their own money. So, in working with the players themselves and their agents, we want these athletes to be big stars.”
The social media push could also help boost viewership of Season 3 of the PGA Tour’s Netflix documentary series Full Swing, which will debut in early 2025. “The players need to be bought in,” Wandell said of how to create a successful show.
Viewership dropped between the first and second seasons of the show, according to Netflix’s semiannual data reports, but the PGA Tour is confident Full Swing can be successful long-term. “We’re trying to talk to our players, talk to [the people they’re closest with], whether it be their wives and coaches or agents, to try and lift up the curtain a little bit to let fans inside to see what it’s like to play in the PGA Tour,” Wandell said.
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