Rapid and cost-efficient recruitment of focus group participants using Instagram

Problem

Recruiting individuals into studies such as trials, focus groups and interviews can be difficult. Often this process can be time consuming, resource intensive and particularly for participants who might be “hard to reach”.Our research project includes focus group study of young women between ages of 16 to 24 years on their experiences on using contraception. We aimed to recruit between 8 to 12 people for each of 16-19 and 20-24 age-based focus groups.

Approach

Following advice from our patient and public involvement group, we designed a poster for social media format (including a £50 Amazon voucher) and posted on Twitter account of one of the authors. After a period of poor response, we chose another platform – Instagram – and used their promotions feature.There are guidelines for promoting content on Instagram (which is owned by Facebook). This includes subtle differences in wording that do not inadvertently disclose personal information for anyone who interacts with the advertisement.The Instagram feature allows targeted promotion according to gender, age, location and content. The cost of promotion was a product of the number of days of promotion and the intensity of exposure each day, i.e. the same budget could pay for a longer, less intense promotion or vice versa. We had a budget of £60 for recruitment and planned to run the promotion for a week.

Findings

At the time of the promotion, the Instagram account used by one of the authors had a small following of fewer than 20 people. We had just over 30 enquiries within three days and had to stop the promotion due to high demand. We had 30 participants who responded and requested study information; nine participants confirmed and attend the focus group for 16 to 19 years and ten attend focus group for 20 to 24 years. There was a total of 217 promotion clicks and 284 profile visits, 76% of which were from the promotion alone. The promotion reached 3860 accounts, with 5629 impressions, 77% were from the promotion alone. The total spend for the promotion was £18.48 or 31% of the £60 budget. The recruitment cost was less than £1 per participant.

Consequences

Instagram can be a rapid and cost-efficient way of recruiting participants especially young women. This and other social media platforms might be useful ways to target recruitment for research depending on the demographic.However, there are ethical considerations when using social media to recruit participants for research studies. Researchers need to consider how to protect potential participants from privacy breaches or inadvertently sharing potentially identifying information about themselves.