“Toxic Butts”: Key Performance Indicators from a California Statewide Social Media Campaign for Tobacco Control

Background: The “Toxic Butts” campaign was funded by the California Tobacco Control Program as part of a tobacco product waste toolkit. The campaign was to function as a case study, helping to establish best practices for social media use by tobacco control while at the same time serving as a training tool for local lead agencies interested in better leveraging social media. Little information existed on monitoring and evaluation of social media so new metrics were devised and results reported with the intent of publication.
Methods: Campaign staff published English-language content twice a day, seven days a week, for six months. The same content was posted on Facebook and Twitter, with occasional exceptions made for character limits on Twitter. Data were collected using Twitter and Facebook as primary sources, as well as with a third-party social media monitoring program. Interactions of social media users with the campaign’s content in Facebook and Twitter were examined using six key performance indicators. Two indicators offered novel approaches to quantify engagement, representing any action performed by a social media user with campaign content.
Results: The six key performance indicators used to measure campaign performance indicated 1.1 million impressions of “Toxic Butts” campaign content by 340,200 individuals on Facebook, over the six-month period of the study. The largest proportion (42.96 percent) of the campaign’s Twitter followers (n=650) was between the ages of 35 and 44 years, whereas Facebook fans (n=1057) were primarily between the ages of 13 to 17 years (59.1 percent). Twitter followers were nearly evenly split between women and men (51 percent and 49 percent, respectively), whereas Facebook followers were mostly male (60.5 percent compared to 39.50 percent female). Health organizations (34.3 percent) represented the largest share of Twitter followers; Facebook followers were mostly individuals (92.8 percent). Engagement ratios clarified social media users’ interactions with campaign content month-by-month and were considered a valuable point of reference for the overall performance of campaign content.
Discussion: The reported key performance indicatorsprovide a starting point of measures of engagement by social media users with a campaign, and the reach of a campaign’s content. Recommendations for future research are provided.