Social networking and the social media sites that facilitate community-building and like-minded connections have grown in popularity in recent years.

While you must have the skills and hoof-care knowledge to be a quality farrier, social networking can help you promote those talents. Old methods, like word of mouth or fliers at the feed store are still effective ways of promotion, but correctly using social networking and social media are the new tools for your marketing arsenal.

Some surprising social media statistics can be found on JeffBullas.com, a popular marketing information blog:

• One in every nine people on Earth is on Facebook (6.94 billion people divided by Facebook’s 750 million users).
• YouTube generates 92 billion page views each month, not including views on phones or videos embedded in websites.
• Over 3,000 images are uploaded to Flickr every minute.
• Twitter is adding nearly 500,000 users each day.
• Facebook took 852 days to reach 10 million users, but Twitter took just 780 days, and recently Google+ had 10 million users sign up in only 16 days.

Obviously, not all of that is equine-related content or users, but the Facebook equestrian community is thriving, YouTube has become host to horse videos of all kinds and the number of horse folks using Twitter is increasing daily. Social media sites have become a go-to resource for many horse owners and potential clients.

A New Way Of Doing Things

When the Internet became public, Chris Gregory of the Heartland Horseshoeing School in Lamar, Mo., says he…