An Investigation of Influential Users in the Promotion and Marketing of Heated Tobacco Products on Instagram: A Social Network Analysis

Jiayan Gu, Lorien C. Abroms, David A. Broniatowski and W. Douglas Evans
Additional contact information
Jiayan Gu: Department of Prevention and Community Health, Milken Institute School of Public Health, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA
Lorien C. Abroms: Department of Prevention and Community Health, Milken Institute School of Public Health, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA
David A. Broniatowski: Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA
W. Douglas Evans: Department of Prevention and Community Health, Milken Institute School of Public Health, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 3, 1-11

Abstract: While an increasing body of the literature has documented the exposure to emerging tobacco products including heated tobacco products (HTPs) on social media, few studies have investigated the various stakeholders involved in the generation of promotional tobacco content. This study constructed a social network of Instagram users who posted IQOS content, a leading HTP brand, between 1 January and 5 April 2021 and identified users who positioned near the center of the network. We identified 4526 unique Instagram users who had created 19,951 IQOS-related posts during the study period. Nearly half of the users (42.1%) were business accounts authorized by Instagram, among which 59.0% belonged to Personal Goods and General Merchandise Stores and 18.1% belonged to Creators and Celebrities. For users with higher in-degree, out-degree, betweenness, and closeness centrality in the network, the majority of them were accounts directly associated with IQOS (e.g., containing “iqos” in username) or related to tobacco business as self-identified in the bio. Our findings further refine the social media marketing presence of tobacco products and suggest that the current self-regulatory efforts led by social media platforms are far from enough.

Keywords: social media; heated tobacco products; IQOS; Instagram; social network (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/3/1686/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/3/1686/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:19:y:2022:i:3:p:1686-:d:740414

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().