Using Social Media Advertising to Reach Youth for Tobacco Prevention Campaigns

Background: United States youth, defined in this project as individuals between 13 and 18 years of age, spent an average of a third of their day in front of a screen in 2021, according to Common Sense Media. Public health campaigns designed to show the harms of tobacco and vaping products have the opportunity to reach youth during this screen time, which includes posting and consuming content on social media - a media channel that allows for advertising directly to youth populations. This project sought to identify the top social media platforms for reaching youth, how to optimize social media content to individual platforms, and other tactics to reach youth on these platforms.

Program background: About 1 in 7 U.S. high school students reported using e-cigarettes and 1 in 6 high school students reported using any tobacco product in the past 30 days in 2022 according to the National Youth Tobacco Survey. Youth have also increasingly spent more time on screens as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and other behavioral changes, and as a result, public health campaigns to educate youth about the dangers of e-cigarettes and tobacco need to use advertising mediums such as social media to reflect where this population spends much of their time. RTI works with multiple clients struggling to reach youth to educate them about the dangers of these products, and these clients are not always able to stay updated on the latest trends in social media network popularity among youth and each platform's options for reaching youth with advertising. Thus, RTI researched the best social media platforms for reaching youth as well as each platform's advertising targeting options, and presented the information in a best practices guide, which conference attendees can access for free.

Evaluation Methods and Results: The social media networks in the United States that allow digital advertising were compared to identify the networks where youth spend the most time. Additionally, each network's advertising targeting capabilities and available advertising formats were also evaluated. The social media platforms TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram were found to align the most with youth usage and preferences, and offered sufficient advertising targeting capabilities as of the end of 2022 for reaching U.S. youth. Video content was found to be most effective content format for reaching youth, as well as content shared by influencers with small-to-moderate followings (about 10K to 100K followers for "micro-influencers," and 100K to 1 million followers for "macro-influencers").

Conclusions: Youth preferences for social media networks and content styles are continuously changing, requiring regular re-examination of campaign channel selection and tactics. These findings reflect social media network popularity and tactics among youth as of the end of 2022 and are still relevant in 2023, as long as these platforms still exist and allow for targeting youth with public health messaging.

Implications for research and/or practice: Public health communicators and campaign content creators hoping to reach youth need to continually review the latest trends in social media popularity among youth. They also need to stay aware of changes in advertising targeting capabilities and privacy considerations by platform.