Which PGA Tour star has the best game on social media (and how it compares to top golf influencers)?

As the competitive golf season heads toward the first majors, we at sportsbettingapp.com decided to take a slightly different approach to ranking the world's top golfers. While the official PGA Tour stats showcase the best short-game artists, the most accurate drivers, and the top iron players, we determined which players' social media content resonates the best among global golf fans.

For this task, we analyzed the engagement rate of each OWGR TOP 50 player's Instagram account. This rate reveals how many likes and comments each player's IG posts receive from their followers. The rule of thumb is that the higher the engagement rate, the more followers enjoy the account's content, and thus, the better the provided content actually is.

As different Instagram audit tools calculate the engagement rate based on various numbers of the latest IG posts, we figured the best way to conduct this type of research is to use two different audit tools, HypeAuditor and TrendHero, and count the average on both. This way, we can reach even more accurate results in the search for top IG content providers on the PGA Tour.

Initial findings: A surprise leader in the clubhouse

By just looking at the number of followers, it's obvious that Tiger Woods is, surprise, surprise, the top dog golfer on Instagram, with 3.4 million followers. However, this figure doesn't really tell any story regarding the content, explicitly the quality of content the account provides.

Therefore, we need to examine the engagement rate, and according to this approach, Tiger, who boasts only a 1.67% engagement rate, falls quite a bit short compared to the best.

Here are the ten best engagement rates among the OWGR TOP 50 players' Instagram accounts:

*All the data presented was gathered on March 25, 2024:

OWGR TOP50 Averages: 376K followers / 4.80% engagement rate

So, with this overall comparison, Sepp Straka is the leader, but some remarks need to be made here. As the listing above showcases, most of the top 10 players have quite a limited follower base, as Min Woo Lee and Scottie Scheffler are the only ones close to or over the 500K mark. However, usually, the larger the audience, the more passive followers the account has, which means that as the follower base grows, the lower the engagement rate gets.

Therefore, we need to compare the results categorized by different levels of audiences.

Let's dig deeper: Follower count matters

Here, the results regarding accounts with larger audiences are presented in three categories based on the follower count.

The best engagement rates with 100k - 500k followers:

*The average engagement rate for IG influencers with 100k - 1M follower base: 2.05% (According to kolsquare.com)

The whole TOP5 from this field vastly outperforms the average engagement rate set by IG influencers with similar follower bases. However, Ludvig Åberg’s ridiculously high engagement rate stands out from these top names. In addition, Min Woo Lee’s figures are insane as this rate is achieved with the largest audience by far.

The best engagement rates with 500k - 1M followers:

With a greater audience, the gap towards the IG influencers' average engagement rate (2.05%) swiftly narrows. Only a handful of players post above-average engagement figures within this scope, with Scottie Scheffler dominating the playing field and Viktor Hovland and Max Homa also posting remarkable digits.

However, Scheffler and Hovland are the only individuals from this group with engagement rates above the TOP50 average of 4.80%, as Homa falls just a tad short here.

The best engagement rates with +1M followers:

*The average engagement rate for IG influencers with +1M follower base: 1.97%

As the numbers show, the engagement rate drops quite quickly once the follower count reaches seven-figure numbers. Rickie Fowler posts the best engagement rate with Justin Thomas following him as a close second, but behind them, Rory McIlroy's 1.72% rate isn't certainly anything to sneeze at, given that it comes from a vastly more extensive follower base.

Conclusions - TOP IG maestros on the PGA Tour

Regarding the results, three pointers are good to keep in mind:

1. A high engagement rate is way more challenging to achieve with a larger follower base.

2. A lower engagement rate with a larger follower base doesn't (necessarily) mean the created and provided content is worse than the accounts with fewer followers.

3. A large follower base alone indicates that the user's IG content has appealed to the public in the long run, as the user has gained a substantial audience.

So, while Sepp Straka's 17.87% engagement rate is indeed jaw-droppingly high, it comes with an asterisk due to his relatively minimal follower count, which is also why he is not included in the TOP list here. It will be interesting to see the Austrian's engagement rate once he hits the 100K follower mark on Instagram.

Therefore, looking at the big picture, we must crown the Swedish starlet Ludvig Åberg as the true Instagram virtuoso on the PGA Tour. However, with both Min Woo Lee and Scottie Scheffler delivering exceptionally high engagement rates with such deep follower bases, the TOP3 ranking seems more like T1 here.

Scheffler's performance here is incredibly excellent as the long-time #1 ranked golfer's success lately has gained him tons of new followers weekly. However, he still manages to keep his engagement rate very high, especially when compared to his colleagues with a similar +600K follower count.

Honorable mentions go to Viktor Hovland and Max Homa, whose engagement rates are also crazy good with such stacked-up follower bases. These guys clearly know what they are doing on social media.

1. Ludvig Åberg (161K followers): 14.95%

2. Min Woo Lee (481K followers): 8.94%

3. Scottie Scheffler (679K followers): 8.32%

Honorable mentions:

• Viktor Hovland (739K followers): 4.96%

• Max Homa (562K followers): 4.19%

Engagement Rate Comparisons: Big names outside OWGR TOP50

However, the Official World Golf Ranking TOP50 scope is quite limited, especially in today's golf world, as many prominent golfers have dropped out of the top OWGR rankings due to the LIV Golf Tour's exclusion from ranking points. In addition, some of the all-time greatest golfers, such as the one with the first name "Tiger," are outside this TOP50 scope.

Therefore, here we present the best engagement rates of a few handpicked household names that stand out from their colleagues.

~500K - 1M followers:

Within this category, Woo Lee, Scheffler, and Hovland are challenged by two true heavy hitters of the game: John Daly and Bryson DeChambeau. The latter is currently leading the race in both engagement rate race and audience size, and DeChambeau is actually swiftly closing in on the 1 million followers mark pretty fast. When you add DeChambeau's 500K+ YouTube account to the mix, it's clear that "The Scientist" has quite an online presence.

It's also clear that Daly's cult hero status extends beyond the golf courses to social media, with such a hefty follower base. However, in terms of pure engagement, Daly lags somewhat far behind here.

It must also be noted that Miguel Ángel Jiménez, another cult hero, posts an impressive 4.35% engagement rate outside this comparison group with 94.2K followers. However, given his status as 'Golf's most interesting man,' Jiménez would quite surely post above-average engagement numbers even with a broader audience.

All the other notable names within this follower count category, such as Bubba Watson (956K), Justin Rose (741K), and Ian Poulter (587K), have engagement rates of 0.13%—0.25%, which are way below DeChambeau and Daly's numbers.

As a further side note, outside the OWGR TOP50 golfers, the top engagement rate of over 100K followers is posted by 95th-ranked Akshay Bhatia at 6.92%.

Over 1M followers:

There is not much to see here, as the bubbling under group boasts similar digits compared to the PGA Tour field. However, you must respect Tiger Woods' numbers here, given that the 1.67% engagement rate is achieved with over twice the audience size compared to group leader Rickie Fowler.

We can add a few additional +1M accounts to the comparison here. The PGA Tour's Instagram account has a total of 4.7M followers, but in terms of engagement rate, it is far below others within this group. The Masters' account, however, is by far the top competition-based Instagram account in terms of engaging content, posting even higher numbers than Fowler and Thomas.

Engagement Rate Comparisons: PGA vs. Golf Influencers

Okay, so far, we have established that quite a few PGA Tour players genuinely know how to operate on Instagram, even though tour golf is where they bring home their bacon. But how do these top IG performers from the PGA Tour compare to actual influencers, who literally make their living creating and posting engaging content on a daily basis?

This is, for sure, one of the most fascinating standpoints of such research, so let's not wait any longer.

Under 1M followers:

The leaders on the PGA Tour in this category:

Top golf influencers in this category:

As the data suggests, Ludvig Åberg, Hideki Matsuyama, Min Woo Lee, and Scottie Scheffler are the only PGA Tour players who can hang with the top golf influencers. Åberg's engagement rate is actually a bit heftier than Steven Castaneda's, a current Good Good member, even with a similar-sized follower base.

Along with these results, the true content king on Instagram is Grant Horvat, who delivers an 11.97% engagement rate with a well-above 500K audience. However, Woo Lee isn't really that far behind the former Good Good member, so the Australian's numbers are very impressive.

With a very similar audience size to the leader Horvat, golf trick-shot artist Joshua Kelley holds a nearly double-digit engagement rate.

Ben Kruper, also known as the 'Pause King,' is the only influencer in this study with a +200K audience who notches a double-digit engagement rate, along with Castaneda and Horvat. However, this number one spot must be handed to Horvat because his follower count is over double that of the other two.

If we compare even the more extensive follower bases within this category, the gap between PGA players and golf influencers widens. The creator of Good Good Golf, Garrett Clark, has an almost double-digit engagement rate (9.23%) with 877K followers, exceeding Schefflers' and Hovland's numbers despite having a broader audience.

Over 1M followers:

The leaders on the PGA Tour in this category:

The best engagement rate outside OWGR TOP50 in this category:

Top golf influencers in this category:

This is the field where the wheat is clearly separated from the chaff. Paige Spiranac, also known as the Queen of Golf Influencers, has the highest follower count on IG among her peers, with a 4M audience. Still, she also delivers an incredible 2.43% engagement rate, which remarkably beats the average rate of all IG influencers in the 1M+ follower category and all Tour Pros.

With a 2.9M follower count, Grace Charis also posts a strong 2.28% engagement rate in this section. So, it is pretty safe to say that Justin Thomas, Rory Mcilroy, and even Tiger Woods have some catching up to do here.

Background: What is the Instagram engagement rate, and why does it matter?

While sounding a bit like fancy tech-based jargon, the engagement rate is quite straightforward. Basically, it shows how many other social media users have interacted with your content. In Instagram's case, this rate takes into account the number of likes and comments posts have received in relation to the overall reach of such posts.

On the other hand, this "reach" only tells how many users have seen the particular post. So, while high reach can look impressive on paper, it does not give data regarding the actual quality of such a post.

This is also why we should care about this engagement rate, as such a figure is the best way to assess users' success in each social media platform. A high engagement rate indicates that the posted content resonates with the people who see it, leading to more visibility on the social media platform and increased follower count.

Therefore, a high engagement rate is also why you might see a particular post on any social media platform even though you aren't following such an account. Like all other social media platforms, Instagram wants to provide its users with the best possible targeted content, and engagement rate is one of the most critical factors in achieving this goal. A high engagement rate on one's post gives Instagram a clear sign that people enjoy such a content piece, leading the platform to actively push the post even to those users outside the posting account's audience.

What is a good engagement rate on Instagram?

According to Oberlo.com, the average engagement rate for all types of Instagram posts, meaning photos, carousels, and videos, is 1.89%. Therefore, anything above this figure could be considered a "good engagement rate."

Meanwhile, according to Hootsuite's blog entry, social media marketing experts agree that a good engagement rate is anything between 1% and 5%, and everything above 5% is deemed excellent.

However, as almost all such blog posts and articles regarding social media marketing point out, the accounts' follower count drastically factors into the engagement rate. This means the more significant the audience, the harder it is to achieve a great engagement rate. Therefore, it's somewhat impossible to name a single "good" engagement rate figure, and such data should only be compared to other accounts with similar follower bases.

Full results & data

Here are all the engagement rates brought out by this study, categorized and sorted from the largest to smallest.

*Data and OWGR ranks as of March 25 2024.

Engagement rates: OWGR TOP50

Engagement rates: Notable names outside OWGR TOP50

Engagement rates: Tours/Majors/Competitions

*With +100K followers.

Engagement rates: Golf influencers