2025 Super Social Media Awards: Tyler Rae

Around this time last year, golf course architect Tyler Rae received about one call every month asking about his services. Then he landed both the first and the fourth spots on Golf Digest’s annual rankings of the best renovations — for Lookout Mountain Club in Georgia and Wampanoag Country Club in Connecticut, both with fellow architect Kyle Franz, the latter also with consultant Brad Klein — and he started receiving about one call every week.

Of course, around this time last year, Rae also hired an outside firm to help him enhance his social media presence, elevating it from meh to marketing.

“So it’s hard to discern whether it was social media or Golf Digest,” Rae says with a laugh. “I think Golf Digest was maybe 75 percent. It put us on the map. And then social media was maybe 25 percent. It didn’t hurt.”

Now Rae is so busy — he has eight current projects in various states and logged 246 flights last year — that he has expanded his team at Tyler Rae Design to 18, a dozen of them full-time. And even without the outside help editing videos and rendering 3-D flyovers of various holes, he still blocks off 10 to 15 hours every month for social media. Focusing primarily on X, LinkedIn and Instagram, he plans out the month ahead and writes every post himself.

“I always do it when I’m on the road in a hotel,” Rae says. “I’ve got to get back to the hotel by 6 and I stay up till 10 or 11. I do that two or three nights in a row. I knock it all out mid-month. Because no one can write the posts for me. They understand my business, they can help me create the 3-D renderings and the videos, but they can’t write the posts. That has to come from me.

“That has to be my feelings and my thoughts.”

The feelings are part of what make Rae’s social media presence so compelling. They’re also part of what landed him a Super Social Media Award — displayed prominently, no doubt, next to his Best Renovation award. He’ll be honored alongside fellow award winners Wednesday, Feb. 5, at the Social Media Celebration at Aquatrols booth #4025 during the GCSAA Conference and Trade Show in San Diego. The ceremony begins at 2:30 p.m., PT. The event is open to all. Free drinks will be served before, during and after the ceremony.

How do you use social media?

I’m not the biggest fan, to be honest. It’s one of those things that’s a necessary evil. I don’t love it personally because I feel like it’s a time-eater, a time-suck. I have a five-minute limitation on all my social media apps. I try to some days not open them, like when I’m home with the kids. But you have to have it for business. … I love Instagram because it is so visual. The photos are great. I think they tell a story. You can see before-and-afters, you can see transformative photos. I’m a big fan of Evan Schiller and Jon Cavalier. I think golf photos have jumped. It’s a huge thing now. And so many of my buddies follow all these golf photographers because everybody is shooting these beautiful golf landscapes. We send all our stuff to the club to make sure it’s approved, because I never want to step on their toes, and I don’t want to screw up any permitting.

You hired an outside social media team last year to help you manage your accounts. How do you utilize them?

I wasn’t posting regularly enough. I didn’t understand regularity. I didn’t understand Instagram Stories. Now I’m getting calls from people, saying, ‘Oh, my gosh, we’re seeing so much great stuff lately.’ It is a business driver. Marketing is a real thing. I never wanted to market. Golf course architects, a lot of us are artists, and we want to be artists, but at the end of the day, there’s a lot of sales. You have to get the jobs to actually work the jobs. Sales is 60 or 70 percent of our job. We have to go find our work. That’s the hardest part. … Social media really helps that. Exposure can only help.

Now we’re creating 3-D renderings, videos, flyovers, before-and-afters, and then we write that content. We set it all up the month before and I try to spread it out. Ideally, each month features four or five Instagram Stories, three or four Instagram posts, three X posts, and two Linkedin posts. We’re trying to put out 11 to 12 things a month, about one every two or three days. It’s very calculated. It never used to be like this. We never used to have enough content! Now, any time we get any attention, any newspaper stories, we save it, and then we try to highlight it in the coming month. Our approach is very positive. Try to keep it knowledgeable, keep people in the loop and apprised of some of the stuff we have going on, showcase some of the stuff we’re excited about, not to be too repetitive.

Any new social media wrinkles planned for 2025?

I want to do more videos — 30-, 40-, 50-second videos that show a flyover of holes. We’ve had two drones for three or four years, but I just don’t utilize them enough. The social media firm analyzes every post and they tell us what’s working and what’s not, and they’ve told us some of the posts that are getting the most traction are flyover videos from 100 feet, the before shot blended into the after. Tons of likes, tons of click-throughs to the website. They say, ‘When you’ve done these, it’s off the charts. You have to take the drone more and you have to fly the befores, the durings, the afters.’ So I’ve been hauling it everywhere, because I know what shots are going to be really cool, what bunkers are going to be phenomenal, what’s going to stand out. And I can’t hand that off. Anything worthwhile in life takes time. That’s the next level for 2025.

Matt LaWell is Golf Course Industry’s managing editor.