Social media targeting of health messages

Abstract

In their contribution, Remschmidt and colleagues¹ put forward an innovative approach for recruiting female, German study participants from diverse social and ethnical backgrounds to assess their knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors regarding HPV vaccination. The approach involves placing advertisements on the social media platform Facebook that specify tags for not only the sought after socio-demographic characteristics (age, gender) but also self-relevant aspects of the target group. These tags determine which Facebook users will see the ad. By sequentially adjusting the tags, the researchers were able to recruit different sub-populations, resulting in a final sample similar to a representative German sample for a particular age group.

Keywords:

• Social media marketing
• recruitment
• health 2.0
• tailoring

Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest

The author states he has no conflict of interest.