Survey Targeting Using Demographics, Location, and Videos in Facebook

In this article, I explore the possibility of capturing survey respondents through video advertisements on Facebook. I illustrate this potential through data collection on home care workers throughout the United States that captured over 5,000 responses in a three month period. I describe the workflow of creating, targeting, and administering the advertisements on Facebook. In particular, I add to the literature surrounding online/social media advertisements for survey respondents by detailing a new process using demographic and geographic targeting. Additionally, I describe the development of targeted video advertisements in response to an increasingly “short-form” social media landscape and compare the performance of video to still image advertisements. These methods allow me to capture a population of home care workers that is difficult to reach and often not formally employed. While existing data on these workers is limited, I address concerns over biased sampling by comparing our sample to the American Community Survey data on home care workers. I conclude by providing a road map for how researchers can use these methods to capture information on other difficult to target populations.