Tweeting to Recruit Patients: Social Media in Clinical Trials

Social media holds a great promise as a recruitment tool for clinical trials. One can argue that sponsors can create awareness for a given trial and get more potential subjects contact sites by using social media. The most common social media portal used in clinical trial recruitment is Facebook, followed by clinicaltrials.gov and advertisement on patient specific web-sites. However, not much data is available on using Twitter for recruitment. With more than 300 million daily users and condensed messaging format, Twitter could create quick awareness for a given trial. However, a review of Twitter in lung cancer clinical trials found surprisingly that almost no sponsor uses Twitter as a recruitment tool. The authors reviewed about 15000 unique tweets containing the words related to lung cancer sent over a period of about 2 weeks. In a 10% sample of these not one of tweets was to promote recruitment or increase awareness for a given lung cancer clinical trial. Most tweets related to patient experiences, treatments, and support texts. The clinical trial tweets were about outcomes of clinical trials. So, what could be the potential reason for this lack of Twitter in recruitment? Clinical trial recruitment material must be approved by IRB and contain sufficient information for potential subjects to get non-misleading complete information regarding a given trial. With the 140 character limit, it is challenging to carve a message containing IRB acceptable content. Also, as with any social media portal sharing of a given message adds to the extra exposure which may or may not be in context of the original message. That said, tweets can be created for creating awareness for a given trial and helpful to get potential participants in a given trial contact the trial sites and sponsors for further information. The goal of any recruitment tool should be to get the target patients to reach out to the clinical sites. While currently Facebook dominates in clinical trial recruitment other portals such a Twitter hold great promise as well. Tweets can also be used to create awareness for a given disease and groups of trials. And since so few sponsors are currently using it, the early starters may get to monopolize the medium.