Table 1.
Metrics collected about social media influencers (n=55) who posted promotional e-cigarette content on Instagram in 2020
| Variable (metric) | Description/operationalization |
| Provided by Meltwater | |
| Username | Instagram username of an influencer who posted e-cigarette-related contact in 2020 and used hashtags and keywords described in Section 2.1 |
| Gender | Male/female (based on Instagram images featuring an influencer in the collected dataset) |
| Geolocation | A location (country) (a) directly identified in an influencer’s Instagram profile or captions to posts; or (b) inferred from a phone number or a flag emblem provided in the profile or a language used in captions/comments |
| Number of followers | Number of users who follow an influencer on Instagram |
| Number of followed users | Number of users followed by an influencer on Instagram |
| Number of followers aged 13–17 years old | Information about followers’ age range is a standard Instagram feature made visible by those influencers who provided access to their demographic data to Meltwater |
| Engagement rate | Six-month average engagement rate per post is a sum of the number of ‘likes’ and the number of comments divided by the number of followers (range: 1–25) |
| Collected by the authors and coders | |
| Profile self-identification | Example: blogger, artist, public figure |
| Frequency of posting of e-cigarette content | Example: once a month, weekly, daily posting of e-cigarette-related content in 2020 |
| Total number of posts | Total number of posts an influencer had on any topic in 2020 |
| Number of e-cigarette-related posts | Number of e-cigarette-related posts an influencer had in 2020 |
| E-cigarette brand name | E-cigarette brand names disclosed in captions to an influencer’s posts on Instagram |