Purposive Sampling on Twitter: A Case Study

Recruiting populations for research is problematic and utilizing online social network tools may facilitate the recruitment process. This research examines recruitment through Twitter's @reply mechanism and compares the results to other survey recruitment methods. Four methods were used to recruit survey takers to a survey about social networking sites, Twitter recruitment, Face book recruitment for a pre-test, self-selected survey takers, and a retweet by an influential Twitter user. A total of 7,327 recruitment tweets were sent to Twitter users, 2,865 users started the survey and 1,544 users completed it which yielded an overall completion rate of 21.3 percent. The research presents the techniques used to make recruitment through Twitter successful. These results indicate that recruitment through online social network sites like Twitter is a viable recruitment method and may be helpful to understand emerging Internet-based phenomena.