This week, one of sport’s oldest traditions tees off at Royal Birkdale, golf’s Open Championship: a huge undertaking over four days as organisers welcome the world of golf to the north west of England. Eyes will be on the competition from all over the world. And not just in person, or even on TV, but on social media, too; itself an area where golf as a sport is looking to improve its presence.

In fact, for an event which takes place over almost the entire day over two weekdays, most of the worldwide audiences will be keeping an eye on the action over breakfast, at work, or in the evening – and that means keeping up to date with the action on Twitter and on apps, as social media becomes arguably more important to many fans than the actual TV coverage.

But the challenges for a once-a-year tournament like The Open are very different to those faced by leagues whose events run every week, or even the likes of golf’s big federations, the PGA and European Tours. They can maintain their presence all year round, but how exactly can The Open manage to stay engaged with fans in December, when the thought of golf on a links course by the sea is enough to make you want to crawl back into bed?

Speaking to Dan McLaren on the Digital Sport Insiders podcast, Kevin Bain, head of digital development at The Open, spoke about his team’s thinking when it comes to year-round engagement for a yearly event.

“We brought our sale cycle forward for tickets, so that allows us to speak to our most engaged fans a lot earlier and allows for them to plan their trip to The Open,” he said, as the event looks to launch a membership system called the One Club, which gives The Open new opportunities to ‘engage with those highly engaged fans’ – opportunities they’ve not had before, in fact. Exclusive content and priority access to tickets are the kinds of things One Club members can look forward to, and not just in the run-up to the tournament. It’s a ready-made audience asking to be engaged with.

But that will only go so far. As Bain says himself, it’s an opportunity to reach already-engaged fans, but it’s not a chance to preach to anyone who’s not already singing in the choir. For everyone else, the tournament’s strategy should be about ‘building the stories’, he says.

The Open’s social media channels should ‘act as newsroom, breaking the stories ourselves’ around the year, and there are actually some good opportunities to do just that. The event might be a fixture of the sporting schedule in July, but qualification events for the tournament start in November and go on around the world. That’s very definitely an opportunity for the tournament’s digital team to whip up interest for event around the world, and at a time when no one is thinking too much about it. Australian golf fans, says Bain by way of example, may be interested in hearing that three Australian golfers are in contention to qualify for the next year’s Open.

That’s still a very niche element of fan engagement around The Open, of course, and a 365 day a year plan is, by Bain’s own admission, ‘tricky’, but perhaps attempting to be active the entire year is simply pushing it a bit far. But the golfing season represents a chance to become part of the conversation that fans are having on social media when the competition starts in earnest.

On social, it’s about ‘trying to weave the open into what’s happening generally in golf,” Bain says. The Masters tournament at Augusta in April is widely considered the start of golfing season, and probably represents the first opportunity to start engaging golf fans and making sure The Open’s own social media accounts are relevant to gold fans more often.

Being relevant for more than one week a year is clearly one of the biggest challenges for the organisers of an event which only takes place over one week of the year, but it’s certainly not impossible. Nor is it the only challenge the tournament’s digital team has to negotiate. This is just one of the topics covered in Bain’s chat with Dan McLaren, so be sure to check out the rest of the podcast when it’s released on Thursday morning.