Social media not just for the young

BASTROP COUNTY, Texas (KXAN) - Lynn Reardon has a special place in her heart for retired racehorses.

Because of those animals, she now has a special place in her brain for social media. Reardon has a non-profit organization called, LOPE Texas, in Bastrop County that rehabilitates and places the horses.

"Lynn started blogging, I think, in 2007," said her husband, Tom Reardon. "She was hesitant to do it; she thought it was a stupid word."

"I mean, I have a horse farm to run and a non-profit to work with, but I found it surprisingly useful," said Lynn Reardon.

Reardon was not particularly impressed with the word, "Twitter," either, but these days she not only places horses in loving homes through the Twitter site, she's actually seen it turn her day dreams into hay dreams.

"I actually tweeted, just in passing that, 'Wow, the price of hay is really high now; maybe I better do an online auction in the fall to raise money for winter hay,'" she said. "Just a ‘thinking out loud’ kind of Tweet. And within four minutes, two people, three people actually, had offered to donate services to be in the auction."

The simple online auction, conducted on the LOPE Texas Website, raised $800 in just over a week, enough to buy 100 bales of hay.

There's more: A professionally produced DVD explaining LOPE's approach to retraining the horses that will be marketed through social media sites and a book Reardon wrote that jumped to number one on Amazon's list of the top 25 horse books in just twenty-four hours after she tweeted about it and put out a "book trailer" on the Web.

A portion of the profits from sales of the book go to help with the care and feeding of the racehorses, which are out in the barn munching on a bunch of free hay.