Insufficient participation in online surveys is an issue that this proposed recruitment strategy aims to address. Online methods of recruitment, and especially the use of social media advertisements (ads), offered a new avenue of grasping users’ attention in order to raise awareness, catch the interest and recruit potential participants in the research. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to report on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter advertising as a mechanism for recruiting research participants into a study investigating the experiences of those who do (or do not) follow museums on social media. The current work aims: (1) to demonstrate the use of social media ads as a significant recruitment method of participants in digital heritage research, (2) to present the lessons learnt from the use of targeted advertising on social media for a specific research project, and (3) to discuss the methods and approaches followed across the three platforms compared to standard advertisement measures provided by the platforms and marketing benchmarks.
Journal of Public Archaeology
