🪄How can Instagram help you recruit research participants?

Written by: Prakriti Kumar

Looking for a large consumer base for recruitment? Instagram has you covered! Here are some techniques we learnt from our own recruitment process on this platform.

When is the best time to recruit an Insta audience?

This depends on the type of audience you are looking for. While you can presume that weekends will almost always give you better impressions, your audience of interest might be active on Instagram even on weekdays. People working in social media marketing, for instance, might be going through Instagram daily to get an idea of upcoming trends. Influencers might be continuously uploading Instagram content to keep their social media active. 

In short, start with weekends and then test weekdays. 

Should I pay the participants? If so, how much?

A key metric of recruitment success is a lower cost of acquisition of a participant. A paid study will no doubt increase your CAC but it signals professionalism and respect for a participant’s time so you are likely to attract better quality participants when you include an incentive. In short, our advice is to budget for incentives. If you are unable to provide monetary benefits, suggest other possible forms of promotion that might suit your client, including company swag. 

What should my advertisement copy be?

To get responses for your study, you want to make sure you have a good advertisement copy to grab those eyeballs! While there is no perfect design, focus on keeping it minimalistic and to the point. Call out to your population of interest, and ensure you mention important features of your study such as duration, location and topic. If a monetary incentive is involved, be sure to highlight it. Most importantly, don't be afraid to change your copy once they stop getting impressions. Play around with various styles and formats, and see what gets you the best responses. 

Here are some examples of creatives that we, at Poocho, have run over the years for research participant recruitment on Instagram that have worked for us:

While Instagram does offer location, age and tag specifications, the ad algorithm is not always reliable and necessitates double-checking responses to see if they fit your sample criteria. However, with a large audience and an advertisement system that is easy to experiment with, Instagram provides a great starting point for recruiting participants for your research.

Cover photo by: Reiseblogger