Facebook is the New Golf

Earlier this week I attended the Arizona Association for Economic Development’s monthly luncheon during which guest speaker Grady Gammage, Jr. talked about “Adaptive Redevelopment: Can We Get Ahead of the Golf Ball.”  I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Gammage speak on multiple occasions and always enjoy his perspective and this time was no different.
Gammage discussed how people are not playing golf like they used to and that is leading to a decline in profits for the already too many courses in Arizona. There are multiple articles that support Gammage’s point on the decline in playing golf including Why America fell out of love with golf in The Washington Post and Playing golf has gone the way of the three-martini lunch — Trump being the exception in MarketWatch. Actually, Scott in our office wrote a blog post on this last year about organizations moving to something other than annual golf tournaments.
The two key reasons for the decline in golf include the time that it takes to play and the cost. Which brings me to the point of this blog post, if people are not playing golf, what are they doing? Gammage was asked this question at the event and he somewhat jokingly said “Facebook,” and the crowd laughed.
But was he really joking?
According to a recent blog post from Social Media Today “the average person will spend nearly two hours (approximately 116 minutes) on social media every day.” And this is not just teens and millennials, this includes older generations too.
So the real question is “Is Facebook the new golf?”