JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Heated tobacco products, including IQOS, are new tobacco products that use an electronic device to heat compressed tobacco leaves to generate an aerosol for consumers to inhale. Marketing of IQOS and heated tobacco products are prevalent on Instagram, a popular social media platform.

Objective:

This study aims to characterize posts related to IQOS and heated tobacco products on Instagram, and their associations with user engagements.

Methods:

Through Instagram Application Programming Interface (API), 979 Instagram posts were collected using keywords related to IQOS and heated tobacco products, such as “IQOS” and “heatnotburn”. Among them, 596 posts were related to IQOS and heated tobacco products marketing. The codebook was developed from randomly selected 200 posts regarding the post content by hand-coding, which was applied to the remaining 396 Instagram posts. Summary statistics were calculated, and statistical hypothesis testing was conducted to understand the popularity of Instagram posts on IQOS. Negative binomial regression models were applied to identify Instagram post characteristics associated with user engagement (like count).

Results:

Among Instagram posts related to IQOS heated tobacco products marketing, “Product Display” was dominant (n = 550, 92.28%), followed by “Brand promotion” (n = 41, 6.88%) and “Others” (n = 5, 0.84%). Among posts within “Product Display”, “Device only” was the most popular (n = 338, 61.45%), followed by “Heatstick only” (n = 80, 14.55%), “Accessory” (n = 66, 12.00%), “Both Device and Heatstick” (n = 56, 10.18%), and “Capsule” (n = 10, 1.82%). A univariate negative binomial regression model with pairwise comparisons across “Product Display” types showed that the number of likes for posts with IQOS heatstick is significantly lower compared to posts with IQOS devices, accessories, and device-heatstick sets. Multivariate negative binomial regression models showed that IQOS-related Instagram posts with a model or lifestyle elements (β ̂ = 0.60, 95% CI: 0.36 – 0.84), or without obvious products advertising information (β ̂ = 0.69, 95% CI: 0.49 – 0.89) received more likes.

Conclusions:

We showed that posts with product display were dominant among IQOS-related posts on Instagram. Posts with a model or lifestyle elements are associated with high user engagement of posts, which might be one of the online marketing strategies of IQOS.