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Traditional methods of recruitment for human subjects research, such as phone calls, postal mail, and flyers, can fall short when targeting hard-to-reach groups. Hard-to-reach groups generally have defining characteristics such as: ethnicity, low soceoeconomic status, and low literacy levels, which creates a barrier for research opportunities (Thanh et al., 2019). Groups such as minorities (Ejiogu et al., 2011), hard to locate populations (Russomanno et al., 2019), and pregnant persons (Arcia, 2014) have been cited in the literature as being hard-to-reach but crucial populations for recruitment into scientific studies. Thus, traditional recruitment methods may be leaving gaps within the outreach and contact aspects of recruitment for these populations. Specifically, traditional methods prove costly when considering the required resources (time, tracking, and money) needed (Tate et al., 2014). New age recruitment methods, such as social media (SM), may help close these possible recruitment gaps in hard-to-reach groups. In using SM during the recruitment process, studies are able to include more minorities (Iribarren et al., 2018), draw a higher percentage of women (Moseson et al., 2021), and have better outreach to younger and other hard-to-reach demographics (Santarossa & Woodruff, 2018; Whitaker et al., 2017).
SM is a collection of online platforms which aim to connect users and allow interactions between them (Aichner et al., 2021). SM can be further diversified into Social Networking Sites (SNSs), blogs, podcasts, and various forms of media which utilize the web as a platform for users to create, interact, and disperse information within a social network of users (Ellison et al., 2013). These sites can further be categorized by the number of daily users they receive, creating the tier of ‘mainstream’ SNSs. Roughly 53% of Americans receive their news from mainstream SNSs such as: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube (Shearer & Mitchell, 2021). When distinguishing between SNSs, Facebook has one of the largest amounts of active users, and currently has upwards of 2.8 billion members across a vast array of different countries (Huertas et al., 2021). In the United States, 69% of Americans (61% of all males, and 77% of all females) report that they use Facebook, with 70% of Facebook users visiting the site daily (Auxier & Anderson, 2021). To expand its reach even further, Facebook purchased the smaller SNS, Instagram, and obtained, along with the company, an average of 400 million daily active users. These 400 million include nearly 55% of young adults (18-25 years old), which increased Facebook’s outreach to the younger population (Alhabash & Ma, 2017).
Together, Facebook and Instagram have become an area of opportunity for outreach to potential research participants (Akers & Gordon, 2018). Facebook has been found to be the most cost- and time- effective recruitment strategy when compared to other SNSs such as Google Ads and Reddit (Moseson et al., 2021). In addition, previous studies have shown Instagram to be a feasible, cost-effective way to recruit participants (Ford et al., 2019). When compared to in-person recruitment; Instagram was shown to have a much lower cost than in-person recruitment, $19 per participant compared to $152 per participant (Kutok et al., 2021). Additionally, Instagram has been shown to positively change participants perceptions of the research program (Thomas et al., 2020). Specifically, Facebook advertisements allow for an array of ways to pick demographic information for target groups. One example of specifying demographics is Facebook’s ‘Pixel Feature’, which collects data from previous advertisement cycles (Flights) and creates a target audience that is most likely to click the advertisement (Meta). With the ‘Pixel Feature’, advertisement costs can drastically change as the flights progress, reducing the original cost per enrollment by as much as 54x (Lee et al., 2019).