Participants should not be treated merely as ‘the general population’. It is crucial to identify the defining characteristics and social networks of the population being targeted if it represents a special population (i.e. pregnant women vs. women battling cancer vs. elderly). This will not only help in creating population-specific platforms and goals, but also present early insight into the potential efficacy of recruitment through social media as an approach based on the internet use and medical-information-intensive use of a particular demographic. Even if the study merely aims to recruit “healthy volunteers” from the “general population”, the overall population should be segmented to different demographics, and each should be targeted individually for optimal results. In the age of internet access and the reliance of the population on the internet for medical information, it is crucial that we use online tools of social media to personally target and empower the participant, and move away from mere business and marketing approaches to recruitment where ads are created as ‘one-size-fits-all’ aimed to capture a random portion of the ‘general population’.