Social Works: How Aftercare Benefits from Social Media

The Retired Racehorse Project heavily promoted the America's Most Wanted Thoroughbred contest on their Facebook page leading up to the event. (Photo courtesy of Megan Stapley Photography.)
Over the past decade, social media has moved from being a fun distraction from work to a mainstay of society.
From sponsoring posts to creating catchy hashtags, both big and small businesses have jumped on the social media bandwagon to make their brands more visible to the public. Racehorse aftercare hasn’t been immune to this, with many aftercare people making the jump into social media.
Back Forty Media managing partner Heather Benson, whose duties include running the Retired Racehorse Project’s (RRP) social media, sees results from the Project’s involvement on the social media site Facebook.
“RRP did a survey … of people who already own [off-the-track Thoroughbreds] and asked things like where they got them, what they do with them and who the people were. The people who own off-track Thoroughbreds are predominantly female … they are 25 to 35 and they are active internet users. A whole bunch of them, somehow the connection was made online, whether they saw an ad or a friend told them about [a horse] or what have you.”
Benson said posts promoting RRP’s classified ads and sharing Thoroughbreds for sale are the most popular posts on the organization’s Facebook page at any time with those kinds of posts getting two or three times the amount of interaction that the page’s other posts get. Those posts get so much interaction because people share the post for reasons ranging from knowing a friend is looking for a horse to being reminded of another horse they used to own.
RRP'S FACEBOOK PROVIDES A WAY FOR FANS TO KEEP UP ON THE LASTEST RRP NEWS

One struggle those who run Facebook “business pages” have to deal with is that Facebook hides pages’ posts from people’s newsfeeds if they don’t interact with the page.
“What’s Facebook’s done since they became public … was filtered those news feeds so you only see things that Facebook thinks you are going to like,” Benson said. “So it’s either things you’ve liked before or things that are similar to what you’ve liked before. If you can’t generate a post that gets people excited, and gets them to interact with it, you can have a Facebook page with 200,000 followers and it might only show up in 100 people’s feeds.”
Other than paying to promote posts on Facebook, Benson writes posts that get people excited so when there is important news it shows up on more people’s newsfeeds. However, she recommends that any aftercare organization looking to start a social media page set aside a small budget so they can promote posts that are really important.
Social media sites like Facebook let business pages inexpensively promote their posts, also giving the organizations many options on who they want to target. One advantage that being able to target people gives a company page is that they can draw in the exact group they are looking for.
“Facebook gives all these amazing tools, if you know that your typical person that comes to your operation is a female who is 45, you can actually reach out just to that group and to people who already like places that are like you,” she said. “Unfortunately you have to at least spend a small budget, nothing huge, nothing compared to building a new website or something like that but a small budget will make a big difference really fast.”
One aftercare page she points to as having a great marketing strategy is the Old Friends fan page. Old Friends founder Michael Blowen created the Old Friends social media pages early on with a main goal of sharing the horses’ stories to raise awareness.
“I just wanted to get as many of these horses’ stories out as I possibly could,” Blowen said. “I thought if people knew the stories of the horses, and you tell them as accurately as [possible], that people would want to do more to help these horses once their racing and breeding careers were over.”
SOCIAL MEDIA LETS FANS SEE HOW HORSES LIKE AMAZOMBIE ARE DOING AT OLD FRIENDS

Photo by Melissa Bauer-Herzog
Today, the Old Friends fan page on Facebook has more than 494,000 likes and Blowen sees many benefits of having that many fans when it comes to raising awareness. But he also sees some situations where opinions on social media can potentially hurt aftercare.
“One of the problems is there’s some people on social media that don’t really know the situation of some of these individual horses, and they get emotionally involved so things can blow up on the internet,” he said.
For example, there are some people on social media who like to demonize certain horse trainers … Now when that happens a lot of these trainers who are being criticized will just clam up and won’t have anything to do with aftercare. That future jeopardizes the post-racing career of some of these horses so it’s the unintended consequences of people that are well-intentioned to begin with and that can be very disconcerting sometimes.”
Blowen does recommend that aftercare organizations that want to start a social media site make sure to focus on transparency.
“I think they should tell the stories of the horses … post pictures, invite people to come and see them. The whole thing is about transparency and being open and letting people see everything that’s going on. That’s the way you do it,” he said.
Social media isn’t just for aftercare organizations, however. Machmer Hall’s co-owner Carrie Brogden says that just sharing horses on one’s personal page can build up a relationship with those who may be looking for horses in the future. Brogden has been using her personal Facebook page to find homes for racehorses for years.
“Now, the people that have the racehorses that they want to retire and give away … contact me, and now I have the contacts on my Facebook from people who have private messaged me looking for one, [so I am able to connect] Point A to Point B,” Brogden said. “I get really crazy during the sales and I don’t do a lot during the sales because of that, but the in-between sales time, then it works really well.”
But someone shouldn’t expect building connections with both racing connections and post-racing career connections to happen overnight. It took Brogden about five years to build up her network of those looking for horses. But now she doesn’t have to publicly post the horses she’s trying to find new homes for because of the connections she has made.
“It probably took me over five years [to build up the connections on social media],” she said. “You don’t see me posting so much anymore because I have so much private messaging demand now that when I get a good one in I just go back in to my private messaging of all the people that I’ve now gotten connected with, that I trust and know. I private message them ‘Hey, I’ve got this’ so you’re seeing me post a lot less because I already know who I can go to.”
No matter if the person looking to get a retired racehorse into a new home is an organization or a private party Brogden credits social media for allowing people to connect much easier than in the past.
“I think social media has allowed the show hunter and rider, the good riders that can handle a Thoroughbred and the people that retire Thoroughbreds to connect more easily. I really think social media has facilitated a lot of it,” she said.
While there is a lot more to it than just putting a post up for the world to see, aftercare groups have proved that social media can have a far-reaching impact for any organization that wants to tackle it.