title: Using Twitter Data to Gain Insights into E-cigarette Marketing and Locations of Use: An Infoveillance Study.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: RTI International, Research Triangle Park, NC, United States.
authors.forename: Annice E
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6585-5876
authors.initials: AE
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Timothy
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8573-0891
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hopper
authors.forename: Sean
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9594-0569
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Simpson
authors.forename: James
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1044-7482
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Nonnemaker
authors.forename: Alicea J
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8544-7279
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Lieberman
authors.forename: Heather
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4950-6881
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Hansen
authors.forename: Jamie
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9765-2299
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Guillory
authors.forename: Lauren
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7052-6337
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Porter
mesh_terms: D066300:Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems / Q000639:trends*; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D040541:Marketing / Q000639:trends*; D061108:Social Media / Q000639:trends*
keywords: electronic cigarettes; marketing; natural language processing; social media; tobacco