Have you ever stopped to wonder why we recruit patients into trials the way that we do? Most of us don’t. Traditional recruitment methods for clinical trials—such as relying on clinic nurses, email lists, or patient registries—present various limitations, slowing down research efforts and driving up costs. These strategies depend on chance, geography, and limited awareness, which significantly restricts the participant pool and the diversity of the study.

There are three broad approaches people take when recruiting patients to clinical trials

• A nurse waits in a clinic hoping to find people who match the inclusion criteria for the research. Usually lots of nurses wait in lots of clinics doing this.

• A clinical trial manager assembles an email list and advertises the trial in the hope that an eligible person replies.

• A clinical trials team manages a registry of people with a condition and works to match potentially eligible participants with the trial.

The nurse waiting in a clinic is a legacy of a pre-IT era when trials were run on a smaller scale. Often as local projects under the management of a consultant.

The clinic was the one place where you would expect to find potential participants, so that became the focal point for the research. However, this has always relied on the nurse being in the right place at the right time to catch potential participants.

An email list is an attempt to use IT to extend the period when you might catch potential participants. Similarly, a registry is an attempt to get potential participants to opt-in to future contact.

What are the limitations of traditional approaches? 

• Not many people think about clinical trials before they need them, so they probably are not primed to be asked and haven’t subscribed to an email list or registry.

• What are the chances of a nurse being in the right place at the right time to recruit a participant who is in the right frame of mind to say yes? Research nurses are brilliant, highly trained and highly skilled, but they also need a large slice of luck. 

• If you are working in clinics, you are limited by geography and cost. You can’t have a nurse in every clinic in every health centre all of the time. 

• Similarly, this approach is limited to local demographics. What if underserved populations (who may be in most need), don’t live by, or attend clinics at, the larger research-active hospitals?

• Email lists go out of date quickly and it is extremely hard to be sure that they are representative of the population. 

• Registries are expensive to maintain.

All of these limitations are challenging to overcome. We persist with them because they are how we have always done things. But, imagine that the idea of clinical research was invented today, in the social media age. Would we design studies without thinking about using social media as an approach? Or if a study was struggling, would we not turn to our social media team to help us boost recruitment? Of course we would. So what’s stopping you using a more efficient and modern approach today? Perhaps it is nothing more than a habit?

In today’s digital age, where most individuals are active online, traditional methods feel increasingly outdated. The question then becomes: how can we modernise recruitment strategies to find participants more effectively and efficiently?

Social media marketing for clinical trial recruitment

Social media marketing is a game-changer for clinical trial recruitment, offering an unprecedented ability to reach participants efficiently. Why?

• You stop going to find participants, and participants come and find you. 

• You don’t need to invest in the same infrastructure (nurses, databases, email lists etc) which significantly reduces the cost per participant. 

• You can target people who are anywhere in the world, or in a very specific place. 

• You can target very specific demographics, for example, women of a certain age and a particular ethnicity with a specific chronic condition within 50 miles of a treatment centre.

Social media lets researchers proactively reach out to potential participants rather than passively waiting for them to appear in clinics. This shift is revolutionary because it allows recruitment to take place where participants are already spending time—online. Through targeted ads, researchers can connect with eligible individuals who might otherwise never hear about the study.

Another key advantage of social media recruitment is cost-effectiveness. With traditional recruitment, a significant portion of the budget is spent on staffing clinics and maintaining registries. Social media eliminates much of that overhead by allowing trials to reach people digitally, reducing the need for physical infrastructure like clinics and onsite staff. This also means that the cost per participant is drastically reduced, even as the reach is expanded to global or hyper-local audiences, depending on the trial's needs.

Moreover, social media recruitment campaigns offer real-time data tracking and analytics. Researchers can quickly identify which ads are performing well and adjust their strategies accordingly. This immediate feedback loop means recruitment efforts can be optimized on the go, ensuring a steady stream of qualified participants. It also allows for better targeting of specific demographics, such as women over 50 with a chronic condition, enabling trials to meet both their recruitment and diversity goals.

Are you interested in learning how social media marketing can recruit for your trial? Get in touch and we can help.