On the popularity of the USB flash drive-shaped electronic cigarette Juul
Level 4 - case-series / case-control
Cross-sectional descriptive analysis of social media posts (by design analogy, non-clinical).
OpenAlex W2798065904 · doi:10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2018-054259
What was done
The authors tracked social media activity surrounding the Juul electronic cigarette by collecting 250,873 tweets containing terms such as "juul," "juuling," and "juuled" between October 19, 2017, and February 14, 2018, using Twitter's free-streaming API. They filtered out tweets from organizations and accounts with "juul" in the username, characterized unique versus duplicate posts, and noted retail market data from Nielsen alongside observations from Reddit and traditional media.
What was found
Nielsen data indicated Juul held a 49.6% market share as of January 27, 2018, with year-over-year growth exceeding 700%. Of the 250,873 collected tweets, only one-third (84,729) were unique, with the remainder consisting of retweets. The top 10 most-retweeted messages alone accounted for 29% (72,521 retweets) of the entire Twitter dataset.
Why it matters
This provides early documentation of how rapidly Juul expanded its retail dominance and how viral social media mechanics, especially retweets, amplified messaging around the product.
Limits
Data collection relied on Twitter's free API, which was subject to rate limits and did not capture an exhaustive dataset. Filtering rules may have inadvertently excluded relevant users or included false positives. Social media volume does not directly measure individual user behavior, health outcomes, or verified user ages, and the abstract provides limited specific metrics for the Reddit and traditional media components.
Cited by
- supports Original Juul pods contained about 5% nicotine by weight, equivalent to approximately one pack of cigarettes per pod.