As you might have noticed from the dearth of recent blogs, the last two weeks have been heavily taken up with freefrom food events – first the first European FreeFrom trade show in Germany, then the Allergy and Freefrom Show (complete with the presentation of the Freefrom Skincare awards) and then finally, the Being Healthy vending conference at the AVEX (vending) trade show at the NEC on Wednesday.
All were actually very interesting – sufficiently so for me to go on about them at rather more length in the next three blogs, so this is to warn to anyone who is really not interested in freefrom food that they should ignore the next three blogs and that ‘normal service’ on a wider range of issues, will be resumed very soon…
However, just before I get going, a little bit of crowing – not on my behalf but on Alex Gazzola’s. As you may be aware he runs all of our six Twitter accounts – and through his efforts we have just hit the magic number of 10,000 followers! No, I know it is not Lady Gaga’s 3 million or even Stephen Fry’s 1.5 million, but 10,000 followers is 10,000 people who are interested enough in the subject of food allergy and intolerance, coeliac disease or other diet related conditions to ‘follow’ one of the FoodsMatter Twitter accounts and to whom we can, hopefully, offer some useful information or advice. Not a bad number!
Sadly, I have to report that our Facebook following (for which I am responsible…) is not nearly so impressive. FoodsMatter does not do too badly with nearly 1500 people ‘liking’ us, but the other pages, (CoeliacsMatter, FreeFrom FoodsMatter and Freefrom Recipes Matter) lurk down in the low hundreds. So, if only to keep my end up, I would really appreciate any ‘likes’ that blog readers were able to push my way!
My next jobs are to get to grips with those two other very popular social media tools – Linked In and Pinterest. Linked in because I know that both our FreeFromFood Awards sponsors and entrants could really benefit from a Linked in awards group; Pinterest on the recommendation of Micki Rose of TrulyGlutenFree who says it is invaluable. (For those who have never head of it, it is an on-line notice board on which you ‘pin’ items of interest with a link to more details. There are notice boards for a wide range of subjects and interests or, you can start on of your own. I have actually got as far as joining…..)