Thanks for the kind words and prayers and love during this difficult time. We know we have some amazing friends and family (and even strangers who are following our journey through adoption) who really care for us and are hoping for another successful adoption right along with us.
To that end, I wanted to share how our friends' sharing our adoption profile helped us connect with this most recent potential birthmom. Yeah, it didn't work out and yeah we are bummed. BUT...at least we know social media can actually work to make this kind of a connection, right? Here's what happened:
Back at the end of January, I did a blog post and mentioned on Facebook that we would love help doing a "media blitz" of sharing our adoption profile or linking to our blog, just to get our name "out there". We saw a huge spike in traffic to our adoption profile and blog over a two or three day period, but we figured the chances of a potential birthmom seeing either of them was probably slim. But two weeks later, we got an email from a 19 year old college student in North Carolina who was pregnant (we will just refer to her as "B" for now) telling us that somebody named Amy C. (I won't post her full name here but it was not me and not somebody that either of us knew) had passed along a link to our profile and recommended that she check us out.
After some sleuthing and a phone call, we figured out the connection: Paul and I have a friend named Nikki (who Paul has known since grade school) and when we shared the link to our adoption profile on Facebook, she shared it on her Facebook page. Nikki has a friend named Amy C. who saw the link. She clicked it and read about us just because she was curious. Two weeks later, Amy C. found out about B and her situation, and went back to Nikki's FB page, found the link to our profile, and forwarded it on.
And voila, just like that an adoption connection was made.
Social media is a hugely powerful tool in the adoption world and can open up doors to adoption situations that we would never otherwise know about or have a chance to be considered for. I did a mini-blitz this past weekend when things started going south with this most recent adoption (I didn't ask anybody to share but once I started sharing, others started sharing too) and we have had over 300 hits to adoption profile in just those few days, which is huge since we typically have single digits numbers of profile hits on most days.
So thanks to everybody who has shared our profile or blog and especially to those who have "liked" our Facebook page (If you haven't done it yet, I just added a link to the sidebar - third item down - all you have to do it click on it and click "like"!). We were at just over 100 likes this past weekend and in a matter of days we have jumped up to 173 "likes", which is awesome because the more people who "like" our page (not just liking a post or a photo but liking the group page itself) the more likely we are to turn up in an internet search of couples hoping to adopt. We have people stumbling on our blog often just by searching phrases on google like "waiting to adopt" or "hoping to adopt" or one of those phrases combined with the word "facebook". You can actually even send out invites to all your friends to like our page as well.
I think that's my little spiel for today. Seriously, peeps, you rock. Thanks for cheering us on.
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