This presents vape industry campaigners and advocates with a problem . How can we hope to fight misinformation and convince detractors that vaping can help smokers when social media users only spend a couple of minutes or even a few seconds engaging with content ? Sharing dense academic research and positive news stories will only get us so far . Campaigners are increasingly relying on video to appeal to consumers who may otherwise not engage with the issue .
As we have covered extensively in this edition of Vapouround , Public Health England published a comprehensive e-cigarette evidence review back in February . The review was overwhelmingly positive and the report and news stories relating to it were shared extensively across the major social media platforms .
As part of their campaign , PHE shared a two-and-a-half-minute animation which concisely explained what e-cigarettes are , how they are helping people and how they have contributed to a reduction in smoking . The animation was shared to their 145,000 Twitter followers , 26,000 Facebook followers and 2,000 Instagram followers . It was then retweeted and shared thousands more times , increasing awareness of the research and potentially encouraging smokers to attempt to quit with e-cigarettes .
There are also costs to consider . This is especially important where publicly-funded organisations like Public Health England are concerned . YouTube is generally cheaper than Facebook but campaigns on the platform may not reach as many people . It ’ s a matter of weighing the potential reach of each one against the costs incurred and then tailoring video appropriately .
2018 has been a massive year for vaping already , with more and more research and evidence supporting vaping as a safer alternative to smoking being published every month . But this information is useless unless it is delivered in an accessible format that smokers and vape-sceptics are willing to engage with . As PHE and Cancer Research UK have demonstrated , our detractors can be reached over social media - it just takes a little creativity .
There is no ‘ one size fits all ’ when it comes to social media . Olapic ’ s Consumer Trust Survey found that 25 % of millennials considered Instagram to be their favourite social media outlet , whereas 90 % of baby boomers preferred Facebook . And while baby boomers liked to see a mixture of images and written content , 75 % of millennials preferred images .
At the time of writing , there are 6,348,850 Instagram posts tagged with # vaping . But the vast majority of vaping Instagrammers share images for fellow vapers who are already engaged with the culture . There are handchecks , e-liquids , mods , coils and vaping memes . It ’ s the perfect platform for young vapers but these are not the people that Public Health England and Cancer Research UK need to target with their campaigns .
Video is undoubtedly the most attractive format for social media marketers . In fact , videos account for 74 % of all online traffic . But all videos are not created equal , nor are all videos suitable for all platforms .
According to Digiday , 85 % of Facebook video is watched without sound . Content creators have used this to their advantage by producing videos that feature text captions or narration . This is augmented with audio where users have sound turned on .
Cancer Research UK opted for this approach with their video , ‘ The Top 3 Reasons Ex-Smokers Give for Using E-Cigarettes ’. The video is only 28 seconds long , so it is easily digestible and very sharable . This makes social media users on the other side of the debate far more likely to listen to what the organisation has so say than if they were being asked to read an entirely textbased article .
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