Marketing Content on E-Cigarette Brand-Sponsored Facebook Profile Pages

Abstract

Introduction:

E-cigarettes are marketed on brand-sponsored Facebook profile pages despite Facebook’s policy to prohibit e-cigarette marketing on their platform. We aimed to identify e-cigarette marketing strategies used and products marketed on brand-sponsored Facebook profiles and assess whether these strategies and featured products differ by user engagement.

Methods:

We examined up to 10 recent Facebook posts on 26 e-cigarette brand-sponsored profile pages uploaded between August 1 and November 31, 2016. We identified positive engagement (i.e. “like,” “love”), negative engagement (i.e. “sad,” “angry”), post type (e.g. link, photo), type of sales promotion (e.g. giveaways, discounts), non-sales promotion (e.g. event promotion without product marketing), and marketed products (e.g. e-cigarettes, e-liquids).

Results:

We examined 225 Facebook posts. Engagement was modest (e.g. Median “likes” = 8 [Min = 0, Max = 591]). The most common post types were photos (52.6%) and links (35.5%). Of all links, 83.7% were links to online shops. Of all posts, 35.0% had overt sales promotional content, 32.0% featured non-sales promotional content, and 68.0% featured an e-cigarette product. The most commonly featured product was an e-cigarette device (50.6%). Posts with more positive engagement included giveaways (versus sales [p = 0.009]) and posts marketing vaping devices (versus e-liquids [p = 0.004)]). Negative engagement was not associated with marketing strategies or products. Of the brand-sponsored profile pages, 42.3% could be accessed by underage users.

Discussion:

E-cigarettes are marketed on Facebook using a variety of promotional strategies. Importantly, underage youth often can access this marketing content. Comprehensive tobacco control policies that restrict e-cigarette marketing on social media are needed urgently.

Keywords:

• e-cigarette
• marketing
• social media

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Ms. Divya Ramamurthi for her advice and feedback during the initial phases of the study.

Disclosure of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by grant from National Institute on Drug Abuse R03 DA041853.