Facebook is the largest social media platform, so it is unsurprising that public health groups are using Facebook to deliver campaigns. However, assessing the contribution of Facebook to campaign impact requires different approaches to traditional campaign evaluations. This includes trialling novel approaches to participant recruitment.

Campaign evaluations typically involve recruitment via telephone or research panels, methods that require significant investment. Both methods require a large sample to capture enough people that use Facebook and have been exposed to the campaign on Facebook, which increases recruitment costs. Recruiting participants through Facebook, on the other hand, presents a potentially effective way to obtain reasonable sample sizes on a modest budget.

This paper reports on the researchers' use of Facebook as a recruitment tool for the evaluation of a public health campaign by the New South Wales (NSW) Government in Australia, the Make healthy normal (MHN) Facebook page.