Australian Pain Society Poster Abstract, Melbourne, April 13-16, 2025

Title: ROBOTS HAVE TROUBLESOME KNEES TOO – A CAUTIONARY TALE FOR SOCIAL MEDIA RECRUITMENT FOR RESEARCH TRIALS.

Authors: Johns, N^1,2,5; Naylor, J³; McKenzie, D¹; Brady, B⁴; Olver, J¹

Affiliations: 1 Epworth Monash Rehabilitation Medicine Research Unit, Richmond, Victoria, Australia; 2. Peninsula Health, Subacute, Rehabilitation, Frankston, Victoria, Australia; 3 Whitlam Orthopaedic Research Centre, Liverpool, NSW, Australia; 4 Physiotherapy Department & Department of Pain Medicine, Liverpool Hospital, Sydney NSW, Australia; 5 The Rehabilitation Medicine Group, Melbourne, Australia

Background and aims

It can be hard to resolve severe persistent pain after total knee replacement with only one rehabilitation intervention researched thus far. To fill this gap in treatment, Kneed, a self-directed digital self-management program has been developed as part of a Monash PhD and is being tested by this team as a pilot randomised control trial. Kneed consists of modules of education, exercise and cognitive strategies to reduce pain, improve function and improve quality of life for people with persistent pain more than 3-months post-TKR.  The aim of this poster is to describe the feasibility to recruit to this study using only social media advertising.

Methods

HREC approval for the trial and recruitment was from Monash University (Project ID 41207). Recruitment was conducted on the Meta social media platform through Facebook Ads Manager. Two advertising methods were utilised, a campaign of static pictures and words ran from October 15, 2024 to October 21, 2024 and a video campaign ran from 21 October, 2024 until December 20, 2024, both in Australia only. The advertisements encouraged people with persistent pain post-TKR to click through to the explanatory statement and anonymous eligibility survey on Qualtrics XM. Data was sourced from Facebook Ads Manager and Qualtrics XM.

Results

The first week of the campaign featured 5 rotating pictures with text and produced 6061 impressions with 112 link clicks but only 2 eligibility survey attempts (with zero eligible). The video had 618,773 views over 8 weeks, producing 21,547 clicks through to the landing page for the eligibility survey. There were 2,211 views (or part views) of the explanatory statement, of which, Qualtrics suspected 410 (18.6%) were bots (internet robots), with some of the bots (successfully) attempting and completing the eligibility survey.  There were 426 attempts of the eligibility survey, 223 eligible and 82 of the eligible leaving contact information (even bots) and 60 people consenting to join the trial following a secondary telephone eligibility check. The mean age of consented participants was 68.7 years (standard deviation 7.6 years), 75% were female, 66% retired and 43% were recruited from regional, rural or remote regions from 5 states of Australia. The median time post-TKR was 15 months. The cost of the video campaign was AUD $5592.

Conclusion

A video social media campaign was highly successful in recruiting multiple older participants at an average of one person per day, to join a pilot randomised cntrolled trial of a novel online pain rehabilitation self-management program. The recruitment statistics are somewhat unreliable due to the presence of internet bots and a secondary telephone interview was helpful to discern bots from people.  This approach, despite attracting internet bots, should be considered feasible for other research trials.