title: E-Cigarette Social Media Messages: A Text Mining Analysis of Marketing and Consumer Conversations on Twitter.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  As the use of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) rises, social media likely influences public awareness and perception of this emerging tobacco product.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  This study examined the public conversation on Twitter to determine overarching themes and insights for trending topics from commercial and consumer users.
  
  
  METHODS
  Text mining uncovered key patterns and important topics for e-cigarettes on Twitter. SAS Text Miner 12.1 software (SAS Institute Inc) was used for descriptive text mining to reveal the primary topics from tweets collected from March 24, 2015, to July 3, 2015, using a Python script in conjunction with Twitter's streaming application programming interface. A total of 18 keywords related to e-cigarettes were used and resulted in a total of 872,544 tweets that were sorted into overarching themes through a text topic node for tweets (126,127) and retweets (114,451) that represented more than 1% of the conversation.
  
  
  RESULTS
  While some of the final themes were marketing-focused, many topics represented diverse proponent and user conversations that included discussion of policies, personal experiences, and the differentiation of e-cigarettes from traditional tobacco, often by pointing to the lack of evidence for the harm or risks of e-cigarettes or taking the position that e-cigarettes should be promoted as smoking cessation devices.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  These findings reveal that unique, large-scale public conversations are occurring on Twitter alongside e-cigarette advertising and promotion. Proponents and users are turning to social media to share knowledge, experience, and questions about e-cigarette use. Future research should focus on these unique conversations to understand how they influence attitudes towards and use of e-cigarettes.
authors.affiliation: School of Media and JournalismUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel HillChapel Hill, NCUnited States.|Center for Health CommunicationMoody College of CommunicationThe University of Texas at AustinAustin, TXUnited States.
authors.forename: Allison J
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-2502-2850
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Lazard
authors.affiliation: School of Media and JournalismUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel HillChapel Hill, NCUnited States.
authors.forename: Adam J
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-8032-4256
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Saffer
authors.affiliation: Center for Health CommunicationStan Richards School of Advertising and Public RelationsThe University of Texas at AustinAustin, TXUnited States.
authors.forename: Gary B
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-4960-2585
authors.initials: GB
authors.lastname: Wilcox
authors.affiliation: Center for Health CommunicationStan Richards School of Advertising and Public RelationsThe University of Texas at AustinAustin, TXUnited States.
authors.forename: Arnold DongWoo
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-0233-1199
authors.initials: AD
authors.lastname: Chung
authors.affiliation: Center for Health CommunicationStan Richards School of Advertising and Public RelationsThe University of Texas at AustinAustin, TXUnited States.
authors.forename: Michael S
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-1758-5354
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Mackert
authors.affiliation: Center for Health CommunicationMoody College of CommunicationThe University of Texas at AustinAustin, TXUnited States.
authors.forename: Jay M
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-2045-4005
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Bernhardt
keywords: Internet; e-cigarettes; social media; tweet