Opportunities and challenges of using targeted advertisements on social media to sample ethnoreligious minorities: the example of recruiting young Muslims in Germany via Facebook and Instagram

Targeted ads on social media allow researchers to recruit hard-to-reach or small populations such as ethnoreligious minorities. Seeking to guide researchers in dealing with the corresponding opportunities and challenges, we address three questions. First, how to define targeting criteria for ads aimed at recruiting ethnoreligious minorities on social media? Second, how costly is the recruitment of ethnoreligious minorities? Third, to what extent do social media samples of ethnoreligious minorities deviate from the underlying population of interest? We discuss general considerations and summarize experiences from a project that used targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram to sample young adult Muslims in Germany. Through comparison with a general population reference sample recruited through similar means, we highlight the challenges specific to recruiting ethnoreligious minorities. We conclude that sampling ethnoreligious minority populations based on social media ads holds great potential but also faces distinct complications and higher costs than recruiting general population samples.