Using twitter data to gain insights into E-cigarette marketing and locations of use: An infoveillance study

Background: marketing and use of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) and other electronic nicotine delivery devices have increased exponentially in recent years fueled,in part,by marketing and word-of-mouth communications via social media platforms,such as twitter. objective: this study examines twitter posts about e-cigarettes between 2008 and 2013 to gain insights into (1) marketing trends for selling and promoting e-cigarettes and (2) locations where people use e-cigarettes. methods: we used keywords to gather tweets about e-cigarettes between july 1,2008 and february 28,2013. a randomly selected subset of tweets was manually coded as advertising (eg,marketing,advertising,sales,promotion) or nonadvertising (eg,individual users,consumers),and classification algorithms were trained to code the remaining data into these 2 categories. a combination of manual coding and natural language processing methods was used to indicate locations where people used e-cigarettes. additional metadata were used to generate insights about users who tweeted most frequently about e-cigarettes. results: we identified approximately 1.7 million tweets about e-cigarettes between 2008 and 2013,with the majority of these tweets being advertising (93.43%,1,559,508/1,669,123). tweets about e-cigarettes increased more than tenfold between 2009 and 2010,suggesting a rapid increase in the popularity of e-cigarettes and marketing efforts. the twitter handles tweeting most frequently about e-cigarettes were a mixture of e-cigarette brands,affiliate marketers,and resellers of e-cigarette products. of the 471 e-cigarette tweets mentioning a specific place,most mentioned e-cigarette use in class (39.1%,184/471) followed by home/room/bed (12.5%,59/471),school (12.1%,57/471),in public (8.7%,41/471),the bathroom (5.7%,27/471),and at work (4.5%,21/471). conclusions: twitter is being used to promote e-cigarettes by different types of entities and the online marketplace is more diverse than offline product offerings and advertising strategies. e-cigarettes are also being used in public places,such as schools,underscoring the need for education and enforcement of policies banning e-cigarette use in public places. twitter data can provide new insights on e-cigarettes to help inform future research,regulations,surveillance,and enforcement efforts.