Hi AoIR :) I am part of an international collaboration of researchers studying cannabis cultivation, especially among small-scale growers. I have an extensive plan for recruiting cannabis growers. One of the methods is through in-person and online engagement with user groups - so far I've been working with one user group who, after a fairly suspicious start, has agreed to support the research and is even piloting the questionnaire for us. One of my other methods is through a Twitter account I've just started @Wor1dWideWeed My question for the group is whether any of you have: 1. used twitter successfully to recruit participants to research, especially participants in hidden populations 2. if yes, have you used Twitter marketing and automation programs like tweetadder to assist the process? I've been looking into tweetadder - see http://www.tweetadder.com/ - because it allows fine-grained automation of many of the tasks which take time on Twitter, especially sourcing new people to follow to whom you are relevant and have a fair chance of following you back. I can see that automating everything just makes you into an annoying Twitter bot... but automating some tasks while still spending a little time actually reading your feed and manually interacting and curating your content, could really assist the process, grow your follower base, and likely result in more relevant people being aware of and participating in the study. On another note, I saw on the tweetadder forums that some people were having their accounts suspended for using tweetadder. Can anyone tell me more about why this is as I'm a bit confused as to whether tweetadder is actually even legal according to Twitter tos? Really interested to hear your thoughts. Thanks! Monica Monica Barratt Research Fellow National Drug Research Institute http://db.ndri.curtin.edu.au/staff/staff.asp?persid=650 @monicabarratt