Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Apr 1, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 31, 2020 - May 26, 2020
Date Accepted: Jan 17, 2021
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Facebook Ads Manager as a Recruitment Tool for an Online Health and Safety Survey
ABSTRACT
Background:
Social media websites have unprecedented levels of growth and usage over the past decade, with Facebook.com hosting 2.5 billion active users worldwide and over 200 million Americans. This population has been underutilized and understudied by the academic community as a resource for participant recruitment.
Objective:
We explore the efficacy of Facebook.com recruitment for an online agricultural health and safety survey
Methods:
We undertook a pilot study lasting one week on Facebook utilizing their integrated, targeted advertising platform – Facebook Ads Manager. We posted three advertisements depicting varying levels of agricultural safety adoption leading to a brief survey on farm demographics and safety attitudes. We targeted our advertisements towards farm mothers aged 21-50 in the United States and determined cost-effectiveness and potential biases.
Results:
Three, one-week advertisements were listed concurrently for $294 USD, total. We reached over 40,000 users and gathered 318 clicks. There were 29 participants who consented to the survey, with 24 completions. Our cost per completed survey was $12.25. Compared to the distribution of farms in the US, advertisements were disproportionately posted to users living in Ohio, California, and Michigan and were under-posted in Texas and Iowa.
Conclusions:
Social media recruitment is limited by geographic and response bias and by self-selection, which needs to be addressed. However, Facebook represents a potentially cost-effective and timely method to recruit participants for online health and safety research when targeting a specific population.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.