Burke Richard R, Weichelt Bryan P, Namkoong Kang
National Farm Medicine Center, Marshfield Clinic Research Institute, Marshfield, WI, United States.
Department of Communications, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, United States.
JMIR Form Res. 2021 Apr 7;5(4):e19022. doi: 10.2196/19022.
Social media platforms have experienced unprecedented levels of growth and usage over the past decade, with Facebook hosting 2.7 billion active users worldwide, including over 200 million users in the United States. Facebook users have been underutilized and understudied by the academic community as a resource for participant recruitment.
We performed a pilot study to explore the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of Facebook advertisements for the recruitment of an online agricultural health and safety survey.
We undertook a 1-week advertising campaign utilizing the integrated, targeted advertising platform of Facebook Ads Manager with a target-spending limit of US $294. We created and 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 toward farm mothers aged 21-50 years in the United States and determined cost-effectiveness and potential biases. No participant incentive was offered.
We reached 40,024 users and gathered 318 advertisement clicks. Twenty-nine participants consented to the survey with 24 completions. Including personnel costs, the cost per completed survey was US $17.42. Compared to the distribution of female producers in the United States, our advertisements were unexpectedly overrepresented in the eastern United States and were underrepresented in the western United States.
Facebook Ads Manager represents a potentially cost-effective and timely method to recruit participants for online health and safety research when targeting a specific population. However, social media recruitment mirrors traditional recruitment methods in its limitations, exhibiting geographic, response, and self-selection biases that need to be addressed.
在过去十年中，社交媒体平台经历了前所未有的增长和使用，脸书在全球拥有27亿活跃用户，其中包括美国的2亿多用户。作为参与者招募的资源，学术社区对脸书用户的利用不足且研究较少。
我们进行了一项试点研究，以探索脸书广告在招募在线农业健康与安全调查参与者方面的效果和成本效益。
我们利用脸书广告管理工具的集成定向广告平台开展了为期1周的广告活动，目标支出限额为294美元。我们创建并发布了三则广告，展示了不同程度的农业安全采用情况，随后进行了一项关于农场人口统计和安全态度的简短调查。我们将广告投放目标设定为美国年龄在21至50岁之间的农场母亲，并确定了成本效益和潜在偏差。未提供参与者激励措施。
我们覆盖了40024名用户，获得了318次广告点击。29名参与者同意参与调查，其中24人完成了调查。包括人员成本在内，每份完成调查的成本为17.42美元。与美国女性生产者的分布情况相比，我们的广告在美国东部的占比出人意料地过高，而在美国西部的占比过低。
当针对特定人群时，脸书广告管理工具是招募在线健康与安全研究参与者的一种潜在的成本效益高且及时的方法。然而，社交媒体招募在其局限性方面反映了传统招募方法，存在需要解决的地理、回应和自我选择偏差。
