The Role of Social Media in Enhancing Clinical Trial Recruitment
From lack of awareness to underperforming sites, clinical trials face challenges that impact patient recruitment and retention, forcing nine out of 10 trials to double their original timelines to meet enrollment goals.
Amidst these hurdles, the number of clinical trials globally has grown since 2000, reaching 477,233 studies by the end of 2023. This underscores the need for innovative strategies for participant recruitment that augment physician referrals and existing patient databases.
With more patients using social media, these platforms present an opportunity for clinical studies to boost patient recruitment, participation, and engagement. Social media offers a highly targeted approach to reach specific and diverse audiences while improving digital visibility for biopharma and pharmaceutical companies.
This post explores the role of social media clinical trial recruitment and how clinical studies can harness social media to attract the right patients.
Why Social Media Is a Game-Changer for Clinical Trial Recruitment
Social media boasts over five billion users who spend an average of 2 hours and 23 minutes daily on different platforms. This offers clinical research organizations (CROs) and sponsors access to a wider pool of potential patients for clinical trials.
Compared with traditional recruitment methods like radio, TV, newspaper ads, and physician referrals, social media offers several key benefits to CROs, including the following.
High User Engagement
The engagement rate for healthcare, pharma, and biotech industries on social media ranges from 2% to 6%, presenting an opportunity to attract the right patients. Per MailChimp, optimal click-through rates (CTRs) for email across all industries are 1-5% for comparison.
Participants can also engage with social content and ads through actions like comments, likes, and shares, enabling organizations to better gauge the reception of their studies and reach broader audiences via third parties.
Specific Demographic Targeting
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) support audience targeting based on demographic and behavioral data, such as age, gender, and location. This allows clinical research teams to identify and engage with people more relevant to their studies, boosting participation and engagement.
Real-Time Communication
Unlike traditional recruitment methods, social media supports two-way, real-time communication, enabling research sites to establish strong relationships with potential participants and perform patient recruitment screening. Patients can connect with researchers, ask questions, stay informed without delay, and share their experiences.
Types of Social Media Platforms Best Suited for Recruitment
During patient recruitment, medical research teams aim for the largest number of people possible and diversity. Few platforms fit these parameters, so most use Facebook, Instagram, X, and Reddit for their social media recruitment campaigns.
For instance, Facebook has the most users, with over 3 billion people, making it the most ubiquitous platform for hitting enrollment goals. It supports real-time, two-way communication for seamless patient interactions, and researchers can create groups where research participants can interact and receive support.
Additionally, Facebook and Instagram share integrated features, allowing teams to refine their campaigns and enhance patient targeting. The two platforms boast over 5 billion users, delivering a broad base for effective targeting.
With Reddit, researchers can tap into health-related groups and communities like r/cancer, r/Thritis, r/Asthma, and r/diabetes to find relevant participants. X remains a viable platform for clinical trial recruitment with over 600 million users, but TikTok may prove better.
Per Pew Research Center, TikTok has exceeded X’s user count and growth since 2017. Moreover, recent controversies involving the site have seen many advertisers leave over concerns.
Other platforms like LinkedIn may offer some opportunities for targeting, but they’re not optimal for recruiting patients with specific demographics, as career-focused professionals comprise their primary users.
Strategies for Utilizing Social Media in Clinical Trial Recruitment
With its high engagement rate and vast reach, social media can improve clinical trial recruitment if organizations use the right strategies. Evaluate the following approaches.
Targeted Advertising
CROs should use targeted social media advertising to show ads to users that are relevant to their studies. Social platforms like Facebook, X, and Instagram allow organizations to target their audience based on age, location, and other specific traits. This enables CROs to attract participants who meet their unique criteria.
Organic Social Media
Besides using social media for paid ads, CROs can organically nurture online communities and join conversations. While this approach takes time to recruit patients, it’s ideal for developing a stellar online presence to foster long-term relationships and improve digital visibility, enhancing future recruitment efforts.
Paid vs. Organic Strategy
Social media allows CROs and pharmaceuticals to use paid and organic strategies to support digital recruitment. The paid strategy delivers almost immediate results and supports enhanced targeting, while organic efforts are ideal for nurturing long-term relationships. For optimal results, it’s best to combine both approaches.
The Benefits of Social Media in Clinical Trial Recruitment
Using social media in clinical trial recruitment offers several benefits with the right strategy.
Increased Visibility and Accessibility
Social media enables CROs and research teams to share their clinical studies with thousands of potential participants. With over 5 billion users on social media, CROs can reach a wider audience for participant recruitment. Plus, users can like, share, and comment on posts, amplifying the visibility of CROs and clinical studies.
Cost-Effective Recruitment
While social media recruitment is highly variable, studies reveal that researchers spend $0 to $517 per participant, compared to $19 to $777 for traditional methods. This is because social media enables research teams to target and reach populations likely to match the trial’s qualifications, reducing resource wastage.
Diverse Participant Pool
Social media networks like Facebook offer the most diverse audience for effective targeting and participant variety. Researchers can tap into the broad audience to recruit participants with different ages, genders, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds to ensure more effective and personalized medical interventions.
Overcoming Challenges in Social Media-Based Recruitment
While social media networks provide powerful tools for recruiting participants, they pose several risks for CROs and pharmaceutical companies. For instance, there is the risk of negative or untrue comments, which can quickly spiral out of control.
You can overcome such challenges by:
- Using multiple platforms: While Facebook is popular for clinical trial recruitment, researchers should not limit their efforts to one platform. Platforms like X, Instagram, and Reddit offer unique abilities to support effective recruitment and broaden reach.
- Avoiding broad imagery and copy: Researchers must ensure ad copy and imagery are unique to a trial’s target audience. For instance, if a study requires women over 60, the images should reflect that.
- Responding to comments and messages: Creating an ad and sitting back to wait for participant signups isn’t enough. Instead, research teams should check comment sections and inboxes to respond to queries and offer more details.
- Complying with HIPAA: Social media strategies for recruiting for clinical trials must still comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Broadly, this means social content cannot be reasonably used to identify any patients, which may affect posts like testimonials or portrayals of positive outcomes. Always double-check social content to ensure HIPAA compliance.
While at it, organizations must also address ethical concerns about using social media in clinical trial recruitment. They must explore the potential risks for target groups, understand user consent, and ensure data collection and sharing transparency.
Streamline Clinical Trial Recruitment With AutoCruitment
With over 5 billion users worldwide, social media platforms have become a key part of online recruitment strategies. Some well-crafted copy or a single ad can reach a wide audience to support CROs in recruiting eligible participants for their trials.
Organizations can use social media to refine audience targeting and segmentation, allowing them to reach the most relevant participants for their medical research studies. The platforms also enable them to establish an online presence, build patient/participant communities, and address myths and concerns about clinical trials.
Social media is even more effective when paired with patient recruitment services like AutoCruitment. AutoCruitment supports CRO partners, sponsors, and research sites to ensure efficient recruitment. It also leverages tailor-made screeners to speed up enrollment and intelligent targeting to deliver highly qualified patients.
Get in touch today and discover how AutoCruitment can help organizations leverage social media clinical trial recruitment.
Never Miss Any News
Join our community and get notified of any new articles.
AutoCruitment’s patient recruitment platform supports Sponsors, CRO Partners and Research Sites by decreasing time, risk and cost to bring new therapies to market.