Getting your head around Facebook….

Did you know…..?

• In October 2012, the countries with the most Facebook users were:
United States with 166.1 million members
Brazil with 58.4 million members
India with 55.3 million members

• According to a May 2011 Consumer Reports survey, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts and 5 million under 10, violating the site’s terms of service. A Facebook executive has said that ‘Facebook removes 20,000 people a day who are underage.’

•  Critics of Facebook, such as Facebook Detox, state that Facebook has turned into a national obsession in the United States, resulting in vast amounts of time lost and encouraging narcissism.

• According to a leading counter terrorism expert, terrorists are using Facebook for hiring loners from western nations like Australia.

• In 2008, Collins English Dictionary declared “Facebook” as its new Word of the Year; in December 2009, the New Oxford American Dictionary declared its word of the year to be the verb “unfriend”, defined as “To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook”.

• On November 7, 2012, the photo of US President Barack Obama hugging his wife after winning the 2012 election had over 3.2 million ‘likes’, a record so far.

With thanks to Wikipedia for that useful contribution to your next game of Trivial Pursuit. (And yes, I have also paid my £5…..)

Anyhow…..  That was only by way of saying that although it has been a bit of a struggle I think we are finally coming to terms with our six Facebook pages – well, seven if you count my own which I started in the hope that it might help me understand the others!!

I knew that having presence on Facebook for more than just FoodsMatter would definitely be a ‘good thing’.  But I had spent the last 18 months happily Tweeting while our lovely American intern, Amy, set up and developed the FoodsMatter Facebook page so I was not at all sure about  spreading outside my 140 characters – let alone adding pictures….

So, a few months ago we all took a deep breath, I invited Alex Gazzola (aka @HealthJourno) to take over  our seven Twitter accounts – listed below – no doubt many of you chat with him on a regular basis! – and I set up  our new Facebook pages. (Making the covers was great fun!)

The number of those ‘liking’ us is now growing steadily (but if any of you would like to ‘Like’ any of the pages below please feel free to do so….) and Alex has just logged us in to the ‘Usernames’ feature which allows us to use nice simple URLs instead of the  140 digit long ones with which I had been labouring!

So please join us at:

FoodsMatter at www.facebook.com/FoodsMatter and www.twitter.com/foodsmatter

CoeliacsMatter at www.facebook.com/CoeliacsMatter and www.twitter.com/coeliacsmatter

FreeFromFoodsMatter at www.facebook.com/FreeFromFood and www.twitter.com/FreeFromFood

FreeFrom Food Awards at www.facebook.com/FreeFromFoodAwards and www.twitter.com/fffoodawards

FreeFrom RecipesMatter at www.facebook.com/FreeFromRecipes and www.twitter.com/FreeFromRecipes

SkinsMatter at www.facebook.com/SkinsMatter and www.twitter.com/skinsmatter

FreeFrom Skincare Awards at www.twitter.com/FFSkincareAward

MBJ at http://www.facebook.com/michelleberriedale-johnson