Strategies to find audience segments on Twitter for e-cigarette education campaigns

Abstract

The development of public health education campaigns about tobacco products requires an understanding of specific audience segments including their views, intentions, use of media, perceived barriers, and benefits of change. For example, identifying and targeting individuals who express ambivalence about e-cigarette use on Twitter may be helpful in devising and focusing public health campaigns to reduce e-cigarette use. This study developed a novel analytic strategy using social network analysis to identify audience segments on Twitter based on positive, negative, and neutral e-cigarette sentiment. Using Twitter data collected from April 2015 to March 2016, we identified different sub-groups of users who retweeted about e-cigarettes, and measured each subgroup’s clustering coefficient (CC), which describes how tightly people cluster together. Ten high CC and ten low CC groups were randomly selected; then 100 randomly selected tweets from each group were coded for e-cigarette sentiment (positive, negative, neutral). Results indicate that differences in e-cigarette sentiment are associated with clustering of Twitter network ties. Statistical analyses revealed that high CC groups were more likely to have strong e-cigarette sentiments, suggesting that tightly clustered groups may be “echo chambers” (i.e., like-minded people repeating the same messages). By contrast, low CC groups were more likely to have neutral sentiments, and had greater fluctuation in sentiment over time, suggesting that they may be more flexible in their opinions about e-cigarettes and may be particularly receptive to targeted public health campaigns. Informatics techniques such as determination of clusters using social network analysis can be useful in identifying audience segments for future public health campaigns.

Social Media Use for Health Purposes: Systematic Review

“…Research effort has also focused on improving the design and evaluation of social media-based health interventions. Studies have examined approaches to evaluating campaign outcomes [56], proposed theoretical frameworks for effective health interventions design [57], explored social media user segments to inform intervention development [58], and examined user acceptance and suggestions of receiving social media-based interventions [59]. In general, empirical evidence shows that integrating social media in health interventions is accepted by target populations [59] and effective in increasing health knowledge, reducing risky behaviors, and adopting health behaviors [60].…”

“…First, future studies should explore and test strategies to motivate engagement based on evidence of audience segmentation. There have been research efforts devoted to examining the audience segments on social media based on network characteristics in a health campaign [58], the extent to which users produce and consume health-related user-generated content [134], and users' motivation for participating in an online community [135]. Although these studies on audience segmentation provide implications on strategies to engage different types of audiences, we need more studies to formally test the effectiveness of strategies derived from audience segmentation research.…”

Where Do People Vape? Insights from Twitter Data

“…Twitter () posts containing 26 vaping-related terms (e.g., ‘vape’, ‘e-cigarettes’, ‘juul,’ etc.) drawn from previous research [25,26,27], were obtained from 1 January 2018 to 31 December 2018 using Twitter’s Streaming Application Program Interface (API). The initial sample consisted of 11,148,880 Twitter posts.…”

Marketing social, indicadores de bienestar y ODS. Análisis de la cuenta oficial del gobierno de España @desdelamoncloa

“…Diversos estudios avalan su idoneidad como herramienta de comunicación en la esfera pública y en la política como Golbeck y Hansen (2014); McGregor y Mourao (2016); Bain y Chaban (2017), entre otros. Recientemente muchas investigaciones se han dirigido a temas relacionados con la salud (Chen et al 2017;Pershad et al, 2018;Aboelmaged, 2018;Zhang & Ahmed, 2019;Colditz et al, 2019;Chua et al, 2019).…”