Marketing and promotion of electronic cigarettes on twitter

Background: Despite the rapid increase in awareness and use of e-cigarettes in recent years, little is known about how they are marketed and promoted, particularly on social media platforms.

Methods: Keyword rules were used to collect tweets related to e-cigarettes from the Twitter Firehose between May 1, 2012 and June 30, 2012. Tweets were coded for smoking cessation and other health claims and mentions, and were classified into commercial tweets and organic tweets, using a combination of Bayesian machine learning methods, keyword algorithms, and human coding.

Results: A total of 73,672 tweets related to e-cigarettes were captured in the study, 90% of which were found to be commercial tweets. Commercial e-cigarette tweets were posted on twitter feeds nearly 200 million times whereas organic electronic cigarette tweets were posted on twitter feeds only 4 million times. Accounts tweeting commercial e-cigarette content were associated with lower Klout scores. Commercial tweeting was largely driven by a small group of highly active accounts, with the top 10 accounts producing 32% of all electronic cigarette related tweets in the study period. 11% of commercial tweets and 9% of organic tweets mentioned smoking cessation. The majority (94%) of commercial tweets included links to websites that sell or promote e-cigarettes. Approximately 34% of commercial tweets included price discounts or coupons.

Conclusions: Twitter appears to be a major marketing and promotional platform for e-cigarettes. Tweets related to e-cigarettes were overwhelmingly commercial, and a substantial proportion of e-cigarette tweets contained therapeutic claims, particularly related to smoking cessation.