A tale of two tools: Reliability and feasibility of social media measurement tools examining e-cigarette twitter mentions

- Two different social media mining tools yielded content about e-cigarette themes that were similar.
- The cost and ease of use of the two social media data tools were different.
- E-cigarette marketing tweets were most common while public health-related tweets were noticeably absent.
- These findings can help inform the selection of appropriate methods for future social media data collection efforts.

Given 70% of Americans are seeking health information online, social media are becoming main sources of health-related information and discussions. Specifically, compounding rising trends in use of e-cigarettes in the US, there has been a rapid rise in e-cigarette marketing - much of which is happening on social media. Public health professionals seeking to understand consumer knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about e-cigarettes should consider analyzing social media data and to do so, there are numerous free and paid tools available. However, each uses different sources and processes, which makes data validation challenging. This exploratory study sought to understand the reliability and feasibility of two social media data tools analyzing e-cigarette tweets. Twitter mentions were pulled from two different industry standard tools (GNIP and Radian6) and data were evaluated on six measures, e.g. Cost, Feasibility, Ease of Use, Poster Type (individual/organization), Context (tweet content analysis), and Valence (positive/negative). Findings included similarities amongst the data sets in terms of the content themes but differences in cost and ease of use of the tools themselves. These findings align with prior research, notably that e-cigarette marketing tweets are most common and public health-related content is noticeably absent. Findings from this exploratory study can inform future social media studies as well as communication campaigns seeking to address the emerging issue of e-cigarette use.