Creating a centralized social media recruitment service for research teams at the University of Michigan

Successful social media recruitment requires specific expertise and constant upkeep, placing an inordinate burden on study teams. Over half of the study teams at the University of Michigan (U-M) surveyed about recruitment assistance needs indicated that they wanted to use social media as a recruitment strategy, but lacked the expertise to do so. We thus built a service to centralize social media recruitment across the university. This involved assembling the right expertise, creating a centralized social media profile, creating linkages to other digital recruitment platforms, building the financial structure, and operationalizing the service. So far, we have helped 94 study teams launch social media campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. These campaigns resulted in 1,653,675 users being reached, of which 20,546 users actively showed interest in participating in the corresponding studies. We followed 18 studies further, who reported a total of 345 social media participants as being enrolled, resulting in an average cost-per-contact (CPC) of $8.72 and an average cost-per-enrollee (CPE) of $55.21. The combination of communication expertise, streamlined administrative processes, and linkages to a centralized research participation registry has allowed us to help a large number of study teams seamlessly engage broad and diverse populations.