Diffusion of Messages from an Electronic Cigarette Brand to Potential Users through Twitter.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

This study explores the presence and actions of an electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) brand, Blu, on Twitter to observe how marketing messages are sent and diffused through the retweet (i.e., message forwarding) functionality. Retweet networks enable messages to reach additional Twitter users beyond the sender's local network. We follow messages from their origin through multiple retweets to identify which messages have more reach, and the different users who are exposed.

Methods

We collected three months of publicly available data from Twitter. A combination of techniques in social network analysis and content analysis were applied to determine the various networks of users who are exposed to e-cigarette messages and how the retweet network can affect which messag

SUBMITTER: Chu KH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4694088 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature