One of the easiest ways to recruit participants is social media – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. Not only do you get to “ask” your followers if they can help you by taking part in your study, but they may also share your study with their own social networks, giving you much wider exposure than you might get directly.
Who to target
If your organization already has social-media accounts, these are the natural candidates to start with.
First, you must decide if a particular social network is appropriate for your study invitation. Mostly this is a matter of deciding if your intended audience is likely to follow you on that network. For example, if you’re trying to recruit customers for your study, you may want to post on the organization’s Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, but not on the Yammer account that you use for internal company announcements.
If your organization has more than one account on a given social network, the same logic applies; pick the accounts that target your intended audiences.
To reach more people, you may also want to use the personal social-media accounts of the project team (if they are willing, and if you think they can reach your intended audience). A request to help out with a study often gets a good response when it comes from someone the recipient knows personally.
What to say
Posting on social media is like writing for a roadside billboard – it’s best to keep it short and punchy. This also helps your pitch fit the constraints of a medium like Twitter.
If you have already created a web ad and/or an email invitation, you can usually edit these down for your social-media pitch.
For example, if we already created this email invitation:
Subject:
5-minute survey for Ministry of Silly Walks - win a $200 gift card
Body:
Got 5 minutes? Want to win a $200 gift card?
Help us design the new Silly Walks website by doing this quick online “scavenger hunt”:
https://www.mosw.edu/study1234
What’s this about?
We’re redesigning the Ministry of Silly Walks' website to make things easier to find. We’re testing our site headings with real users, so make sure they work well.
etc.
…then we could write our Facebook post like this:
- ss of this as a real Facebook post:
Got 5 minutes? Want to win a $200 gift card?
Help us design the new Silly Walks website by doing this quick online “scavenger hunt”:
https://www.mosw.edu/study1234
…and our Twitter post like this:
5-minute survey for the new Ministry of Silly Walks site - win a $200 gift card! bit.ly/1gk4321
Note that, in the Twitter post, you may need to replace your normal URL with a shortened version (using a service such as Bitly or TinyURL) to keep within the Twitter character limit.
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