ArticleTobacco control2025
Digital footprints of the US e-cigarette market: correlations among retail sales data, social media activity and Google search trends.
Article in Tobacco control, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
introductionThe global market for electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) has been changing rapidly. There is limited research on whether real-time social media activities and Google search trends could reflect the e-cigarette market.
methodsUsing retrospective US retail sales data (Circana) of four popular e-cigarette brands (JUUL, Puff Bar, Hyde and Elf Bar) every 4 weeks from May 2021 to January 2023, we examined their Spearman correlations with the Google search trends and social media (Twitter, Reddit and Instagram) mentions during the same period. We applied linear mixed-effects models to the pooled brands data to further examine the association between sales and online activities, accounting for both within-brand temporal correlation and between-brand variability in baseline sales.
resultsWe observed strong positive correlations between retail sales and Google search trends across all four brands, with Spearman correlation r ranging from 0.59 to 0.99 (p<0.001). Reddit mentions were also highly correlated with sales of each e-cigarette brand, with correlations ranging from 0.54 to 0.88 (p<0.01). Twitter mentions showed moderate to high correlations with sales, ranging from 0.46 to 0.88 (p<0.05). Instagram mentions demonstrated strong correlations with sales, ranging from 0.74 to 0.96 (p<0.001), except for Puff Bar (r=-0.06, p=0.793). The linear mixed-effects models indicated that Google Trends (estimate=0.391, p=0.002) and Twitter mentions (estimate=0.096, p=0.011) were significant predictors of sales.
conclusionsGoogle search trends and social media activities can serve as digital footprints of the e-cigarette market, providing reliable data sources for near-real-time monitoring of the prominence of e-cigarette brands in the marketplace.
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