Trial reportJournal of medical Internet research2018
Using Facebook for Large-Scale Online Randomized Clinical Trial Recruitment: Effective Advertising Strategies.
Trial report in Journal of medical Internet research, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 49 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
49 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Occupational Health Applied Infodemiological Studies of Nutritional Diseases and Disorders: Scoping Review with Meta-Analysis.Nutrients · 2023Pooled it
- Online Patient Recruitment in Clinical Trials: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2020Pooled it
- Social media recruitment for mental health research: A systematic review.Comprehensive psychiatry · 2020Pooled it
- Digital Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia Compared to Sleep Health Education in Older Adults With Mild Cognitive Impairment and Insomnia: A Feasibility Randomised Controlled Trial.Journal of sleep research · 2026Trial
- Using Social Media to Recruit a Diverse Sample of Participants for a Mobile Health (mHealth) Intervention to Increase Physical Activity: Exploratory Study.JMIR mHealth and uHealth · 2025Trial
- Testing the Effectiveness of a Mindfulness- and Acceptance-Based Smartphone App for Nurses Traumatized by the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Pilot Study.Issues in mental health nursing · 2024Trial
- Understanding Recruitment Yield From Social Media Advertisements and Associated Costs of a Telehealth Randomized Controlled Trial: Descriptive Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2023Trial
- The effect of a therapeutic smartphone application on suicidal ideation in young adults: Findings from a randomized controlled trial in Australia.PLoS medicine · 2022Trial
- Recruiting and Retaining Youth and Young Adults in the Policy and Communication Evaluation (PACE) Vermont Study: Randomized Controlled Trial of Participant Compensation.Journal of medical Internet research · 2020Trial
- Effect of a Responsiveness-Based Support Intervention on Smokeless Tobacco Cessation: The UCare-ChewFree Randomized Clinical Trial.Nicotine & tobacco research : official journal of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco · 2020Trial
- Testing the efficacy and mechanisms of an SMS intervention focused on motivating peer network support to reduce alcohol consumption in non-collegiate young adults: Protocol for a randomized trial.Contemporary clinical trials · 2025Article
- Methodological approaches and author-reported limitations in evaluation studies of digital health technologies (DHT): A scoping review of DHT interventions for cancer, diabetes mellitus, and cardiovascular diseases.PLOS digital health · 2025Review
- Improving the User Interface and Guiding the Development of Effective Training Material for a Clinical Research Recruitment and Retention Dashboard: Usability Testing Study.JMIR formative research · 2025Article
- Comparison of targeted web-based advertising versus traditional methods for recruiting older adults into clinical trials.Journal of the American Geriatrics Society · 2025Article
- Domain-specific participant recruitment exceeds the application of "Targeted" advertisement from common online advertising platforms.Journal of clinical and translational science · 2025Article
- Creating an Empirical Dermatology Dataset Through Crowdsourcing With Web Search Advertisements.JAMA network open · 2024Observational
- Article
- Social Marketing Perspective on Participant Recruitment in Informatics-Based Intervention Studies.AIDS and behavior · 2024Article
- Digital recruitment and compliance to treatment recommendations in the Norwegian Atrial Fibrillation self-screening pilot study.European heart journal. Digital health · 2024Article
- Low-Cost Recruitment Approach: Utilizing Facebook Groups to Recruit COVID-19 Long-Haulers.Research square · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Targeted Facebook advertising can be an effective strategy to recruit participants for a large-scale online study. Facebook advertising is useful for reaching people in a wide geographic area, matching a specific demographic profile. It can also target people who would be unlikely to search for the information and would thus not be accessible via Google AdWords. It is especially useful when it is desirable not to raise awareness of the study in a demographic group that would be ineligible for the study. This paper describes the use of Facebook advertising to recruit and enroll 1145 women over a 15-month period for a randomized clinical trial to teach support skills to female partners of male smokeless tobacco users. This tutorial shares our study team's experiences, lessons learned, and recommendations to help researchers design Facebook advertising campaigns. Topics covered include designing the study infrastructure to optimize recruitment and enrollment tracking, creating a Facebook presence via a fan page, designing ads that attract potential participants while meeting Facebook's strict requirements, and planning and managing an advertising campaign that accommodates the rapid rate of diminishing returns for each ad.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.