Facebook Me!

This is my Facebook page. A year and a couple months ago, when I was diagnosed, I didn't think my "disease" if you must call it that, would benefit me academically. It sure did, though. When this assignment was first presented, I thought, "Crap, what am I going to dedicate a whole Facebook page to?" BAM! It came to me. So here it is: 

My mission statement was simple: 

I think I strayed from my original mission statement. As I progressed through the semester, I would be breakfast or I would take something to work and think, "Hey, my fellow Celiacs should know about this amazingly tasty meal," so I shared it on my page. I'd say food ideas make up most of my page. I tried to generate a discussion with a few of my posts but it never seemed to take off. The most engagement I would receive would be one comment, MAYBE two. 

This just shows how many likes my page has today: A total of 66. 

This was my reach. The highest point on there correlated with the post I made on December 10, 2014. This post was a video of a popular song by Lorde with the lyrics changed to make light of a Celiac plight. This made sense to me, it was a clever rendition of the song. 

This is a screenshot of my posts. I posted a lot of pictures of food. I did this because one of the biggest concerns, in my opinion, that an individual with Celiac has is what they are able to eat. What can I have and still enjoy without getting sick? Well, I've been on that journey for a year now and by trial-and-error sampling and investigation, I have found what works. Those posts received a fair amount of feedback, especially one I posted that asked about local restaurants in town people had frequented and found to have gluten-free options. Also, one post that I was particular happy about was my "Fall in love with breakfast again." I talked about the bread that I had put my breakfast eggs atop. This bread is the best brand to hit the gluten-free world. I raved about it, more or less, and one of my followers wanted to know the brand. Gasp. She wanted to know the brand and I could had the answer!!! I could help her out! My last post, a video, didn't receive as many likes as I had anticipated since it was a video and I thought it was pretty funny but overall, my posts attracted decent feedback. I think I even warranted 2 shares on the video.  

This assignment was a soul-stretcher. Like I've said before, this class has really cultivated critical thinking skills. I constantly found myself trying to think of something worthwhile to post and share with my followers. What would the Celiac population I've been wanting to reach want to know? What light can I shed on this quandary we (as people with Celiac) are faced with? 

I think I hit 2/3 of my personas from the beginning of the semester. They were: people like me, who are new/fairly new to this whole gluten-free diet way-of-life, the mother who doesn't know what to fix for her kid with the disease and the rest of the family is not, and the clueless people who don't even know what Celiac disease is. Like I said, I posted a lot of food options so I would say that appealed to the first two personas. The other posts with which I was trying to be funny, again, the first two personas might be able to understand the humor. However, I did not make the clueless, well...less clueless. What I should have done was have one of my first posts be what Celiac disease is. That would have set the page up for sure. 

When it comes down to it, I would have done two things differently: (1) address the clueless population and (2) added a bit more of a variety of posts since I feel 90% of my posts were pictures of food. 

I do like the first post I made, though. I did sort of a throwback to when I was diagnosed and encouraged my followers to do the same. My point was to encourage a type of camaraderie among the readers. I was so excited (since it was my first post), when I was notified I had two comments!!! That was a bright spot of the whole experience, most definitely. 

I've never had a specialized Facebook page before, so this was a journey to remember. Thank you Professor Young for encouraging me to think outside the box!