Nine different recruitment strategies—ranging from traditional recruitment methods such as institutional email lists and newspapers, to more interactive strategies such as Facebook advertisements—were chosen to increase the visibility of the trial in places where potentially interested mothers would be looking. Unfortunately, limited efforts were invested in Facebook recruitment, and that resulted in a small number of eligible mothers who were enrolled using this method. Studies have demonstrated the efficacy of social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) for increasing research dissemination and recruitment of various types of participants, such as doctors and medical students [
63], young adults [
64], older adults [
15], and women trying to conceive [
65], with some evidence of similar sociodemographic characteristics between samples recruited from in-person methods and those recruited though social media [
65]. In these examples of studies, social media recruitment strategies had been attentively planned and re-evaluated, if necessary, during recruitment. Other intervention studies in which social media recruitment was shown effective offered a monetary incentive to increase participation responses [
66], which was not the case in the present trial. Scholars have proposed best practices for using social media to recruit participants in medical research [
67]; yet, even thoughtfully planned social media-enabled strategies are not necessarily more effective than other recruitment methods [
68]. A review of medical studies using social media recruitment has shown that only 12 out of 30 studies found social media (mostly Facebook) to be more effective than traditional recruitment methods, among which only 4 were intervention studies [
13]. Facebook attracted several mothers who were living too far away from the research institute to allow convenient travels for study appointments. Conducting outcome assessments remotely might have improved the Facebook recruitment rate and balanced the geographic representation of recruited mothers, and there is evidence that social media recruitment is most efficacious when used alongside online data collection [
15]. Additionally, it remains unclear how many repeated viewings of social media advertisements are necessary before users take the next step towards engagement [
67]. It is possible that Facebook recruitment rates could have been higher if the intervention had been delivered using this platform instead of a blog. It must, however, be acknowledged that similar participant retention rates were observed between the traditional recruitment strategies and Facebook. Nonetheless, capturing social media preferences and concerns of the target population should be a critical primary step to address in future research to tailor appropriate social media recruitment to capture the attention and interest of eligible individuals (e.g. choosing relevant keywords that are reflective of the interests of the target users’ profiles, regularly monitoring the recruitment campaign through Facebook analytics to flag advertisement parameters needing adjustments) and to avoid trial-and-error processes to determine the best recruitment yield [
15,
67].