Abstract
BackgroundUsing social media to recruit specific populations for research studies is gaining popularity. Given that mothers of young children are the most active on social media, and young children are the most at risk of preventable burn injuries, social media was used to recruit mothers of young children to a burn prevention intervention.ObjectiveThe aim of this paper was to describe the social media recruitment methods used to enroll mothers of young children to the app-based burn prevention intervention Cool Runnings.MethodsParticipants were recruited via paid Facebook and Instagram advertisements to a 2-group, parallel, single-blinded, randomized controlled trial (RCT). The advertisements were targeted at women 18 years and older, living in Queensland, Australia, with at least 1 child aged 5 to 12 months at the time of recruitment.ResultsOver the 30-day recruitment period from January to February 2016, Facebook and Instagram advertisements reached 65,268 people, generating 2573 link clicks, 1161 app downloads, and 498 enrolled participants to the Cool Runnings RCT. The cost per enrolled participant was Aus $13.08. Saturdays were the most effective day of the week for advertising results. The most popular time of day for enrolments was between 5 to 11 PM. This recruitment strategy campaign resulted in a broad reach of participants from regional, rural, and remote Queensland. Participants were representative of the population in regard to age and education levels.ConclusionsTo our knowledge, this is the first use of social media recruitment for an injury prevention campaign. This recruitment method resulted in the rapid and cost-effective recruitment of participants with social, geographic, and economic diversity that were largely representative of the population.
Highlights
More than half of the world’s population has access to the Internet, and 2.8 billion people actively use social media [1]
Facebook’s ability to target advertising to specific demographics from its diversity of users offers researchers an opportunity to recruit populations that can be hard to access via traditional recruitment methods, including economically disadvantaged and geographically remote populations [3,4,5]
During the 30-day recruitment period, 498 participants were recruited to the Cool Runnings study through Facebook and Instagram advertisements
Summary
More than half of the world’s population has access to the Internet, and 2.8 billion people actively use social media [1]. In Australia, approximately 70% of the population actively uses Facebook and the largest demographic are women aged 25 to 34 years [5]. Results: Over the 30-day recruitment period from January to February 2016, Facebook and Instagram advertisements reached 65,268 people, generating 2573 link clicks, 1161 app downloads, and 498 enrolled participants to the Cool Runnings RCT. The most popular time of day for enrolments was between 5 to 11 PM This recruitment strategy campaign resulted in a broad reach of participants from regional, rural, and remote Queensland. Conclusions: To our knowledge, this is the first use of social media recruitment for an injury prevention campaign This recruitment method resulted in the rapid and cost-effective recruitment of participants with social, geographic, and economic diversity that were largely representative of the population
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