Announcing via Facebook

[weeblueberry]

In an ideal world, no I wouldn't do it. But as a result of working in the US for a year most of my friends are scattered across the globe. I'm sure they'd all like to know we're expecting so we're talking about putting up a FB announcement.

Before I'd joined Mumsnet I'd always just assumed I'd pop the scan image up and everyone and their rabbit would congratulate us etc etc and everyone would know. But I've read a couple of threads where people are quite against the scan image thing because a) it's considered tacky and b) it could be upsetting to someone who (unknown to me) has just lost a baby or is having trouble conceiving. One of my colleagues mentioned a couple of years ago that having problems conceiving was made really difficult because every week that went by seemed to have someone else pregnant on FB.

So what did you do? Ultimately without sending dozens and dozens of individual emails it's not practical to tell everyone without the 'mass spend' idea but I'm open to suggestions? Similarly I'm not keen on the whole 'tell them as and when' as there are a lot of people on my FB who would love to know but I don't see on a weekly, monthly or even yearly basis!

What do you guys think? How did you announce it on FB if you did it at all?

Well, it depends if all your friends are people you physically see reguarly. Like the OP, we have a lot of friends scattered all over the world. If you see all your friends regularly you probably don't need to use facebook as more of a 'updating your lives' with each other, and can just use it for events/e-mailing.

People with different patterns of friendship groups use it differently. If you don't post other things about your life on there, then it would be odd to suddenly post that you're pregnant. If you do daily status updates, it might be really odd to not at any point mention the biggest thing that's happening in your life.

OP - the thread has gone off a little bit from your orginal question, but I don't see how reading about your pregnancy on facebook would be any less hurtful to getting a text or e-mail telling someone who's just lost a baby/struggling to concieve that you're pregnant. The medium isn't what upsets them, it's the fact that you are their peer and pregnant. Facebook is far less 'in your face' than other ways of telling people the same news. And as you can see from other threads on here, it's really hard to judge who is struggling, a lot of people don't talk about it, so if you have a large enough groupd of friends, you will probably know someone who's had a MC/trouble getting pregnant.