Horse Tweets?

Dappled Grey (@dappledgrey) has been having a great time playing in the proverbial sandbox of social networking known as twitter. There’s a lot of interesting “horsey” talk going on, with recent conversation trends emerging around sport horse events such as the FEI World Cup Finals in Las Vegas, Rolex Kentucky Three Day Event, and the Kentucky Derby. In Vegas, Dappled Grey joined Equestrisol (@equestrisol),
Chronicle of the Horse (@ChronOfHorse), and a host of others in reporting up to the
minute tweets of the action from inside the event.

As you may already know, twitter is a “free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets” (from Wikipedia). Twitter attracts followers of all different types, with celebrity tweets attracting a lot of media attention recently (eg. Ashton Kutcher passing the 1M follower mark).

At events like the World Cup Finals, tweets set up and use a “hashtag,” basically a # appearing before key words, to make updates about the event easier to search and follow.

Looking at the Twitter directory We Follow, the tag “horse” is associated with roughly 41,000 followers. The tag “dressage” has 4,765 followers; equestrian has 22,119. This is just one measure, but you get the idea…horse people are a bunch of noisy birds!

As Dappled Grey’s list of “followers” and “following” grows, I’ve been thinking about the different categories of horse enthusiasts that I’m engaged with on twitter. Keep in mind, my twitter activity generally focuses on following horse tweets involved with the English sport horse disciplines. Here’s a sample:

General horse lovers/owners/riders: tweets mostly about their personal horse/riding/barn activities, some with a lot of unique personality, humor, and insight!

Trainers and other sport horse professionals: fun to follow to keep up with the show scene and useful riding tips.

Equestrian brands and retailers: major brands like Horseware (@Horseware) and ThinLine (@ThinLine), as well as retailers like Equestrian Collections (@EqCollections) and the boutique Riding Couture (@RidingCouture) are active tweeters. Tweets range from from deals on new products to @EqCollections recent “twitter conference” with the bit experts at Myler Bits.

Veterinarians: one of my favorite vet tweets is Geoff Tucker, DVM (@EquinePractice), an equine dentist who lets followers join along as he visits sport horse barns up and down the East Coast.

Horse rescues and welfare organizations: tweets from this group offer great information on rescue efforts, welfare legislation, and more. Some are equine specific and other more broad, like the Humane Society of the United States (@HumaneSociety), which has 6,000+ followers.

Equine media: great news updates from the @ChronofHorse, Equine Connect (@EquineConnect), Equestrian Life (@EquestrianLife), Horses Inc. (@HorsesInc), and other web and print media networks.

Equine artists: there’s a really active community of equine artists on twitter, on most frequently link to images of their beautiful works in progress. Some of my first “follows” were very talented artists like Kathi Peters (@cobcottage) and Jennifer Pratt (@jennprattartist).

Sales agents: a few pioneering sales agents and barns are using the twitterverse to market sale horses.

Horses: Yep, there are quite a few of our hooved friends who have taken up twitter, like Dappled Grey’s own Fitch (@fitch_leknott), who has been known to tweet nasty things about his mother when she doesn’t come out to visit him at the barn.

The list of Horse Tweets is obviousely far too long to list everyone. Each day, twitter allows Dappled Grey to meet new horse people and learn new things.  Sound interesting? Come join the conversation!