Weird Milestone
By Martin Kevill, Community Manager
On Wednesday evening, the @WeirdHorse Twitter account reached the 100,000 follower mark. To put that figure into perspective, Fred the Weatherman has 17,000 followers, Vic Reeves has 50,000, Keane have 105,000 and The Sun newspaper has 121,000.
The account is manned by a horse who lives in a field and tweets about his daily activities. It’s popular because the concept is so ridiculous and each tweet is so inane that they tickle people into re-tweeting or recommending the account. It offers a pleasant respite from the streams of news and opinion and adds another string of content to Twitter. He follows only two people; jump-jockey AP McCoy and Weird Horse’s apparent owner known simply as Baffled Farmer. The growth comes primarily from the mass re-tweeting of each tweet and with around 10 tweets a day, it’s purely down to the reach and ‘shareability’ of the content.
Twitter success isn’t based on followers – it’s much more than that but it is worth having a quick look at the Weird Horse stats.
The account was opened on July 27th 2011
The first tweet was “Just done a neigh”
The 100,000th follower came after 322 days (13th June 2012)
Weird Horse currently has 104,759 followers (18th June 2012)
The average daily follower increase is 311
The highest re-tweet count to date is 2,618 with “R.I.P, to the horse you used to see. Those days are over, horsey fell over”
Weird Horse has a Klout rating of 74
It’s had 240,000 re-tweets and 33,000 mentions in the last 90 days
Weird Horse hasn’t been championed by any major influencers on Twitter and as a result the growth has been a steady one. Twitter accounts often experience occasions where someone huge recommends them and there is an increase of something like 10,000 new followers in around two days before dropping back to a more mundane growth. Since Weird Horse reached the 20,000 follower mark, the rate of increase has stayed the same, growing by 10,000 followers every 16 or 17 days. Although Twitter accounts benefit greatly from recommendations by high profile users, the fact that Weird Horse has maintained such an aggressive growth without this help suggests that it does have legs (four*).
*and a mane
