Smoking Cessation Intervention on Social Media: QuitNet Forum and QuitNet Facebook

Background QuitNet is one of the most popular intervention website for smoking cessation. It has attracted a large amount of users and provided different services to support them in quitting. QuitNet has forums on its original website which provide communities for users to discuss smoking cessation issues. Recently, QuitNet also built a public page on Facebook, and provided another channel for people to acquire information and communicate on smoking cessation. Objective QuitNet Forum on its original website and QuitNet Facebook provide two communication channels with different features. QuitNet Forum is a specific platform for smoking cessation. Its users have clear goals and strong determinations to quit smoking. On the other hand, Facebook is a popular social media site for general purposes. Users of QuitNet Facebook may not use Facebook mainly for smoking cessation but only as one of the many activities in social networking. They may participate in the discussion on smoking cessation more passively and casually. In our research, we study and compare user characteristics and behaviors on QuitNet Forum and QuitNet Facebook. The result could help us to understand the features of the two different communication channels. It can be useful in developing effective intervention. Methods We collected data of posts and comments separately from QuitNet Forum and QuitNet Facebook. We also collected the quit statuses of users from their profiles and comment contents. Quit status refers to how many days a smoking quitter has been abstinent from tobacco. It is an important user characteristic and an indicator for the outcome of smoking cessation. According to quit statuses, we divided users of both channels into five different groups based on the length of abstinent. We analyzed the distribution of user quit statuses of the two channels. To investigate user behavior of the two channels, we construct two social networks based on the user interactions respectively. We utilized social network analysis metrics including degree centrality, group centralization and core/periphery structures to investigate and compare the two social networks. These metrics can reflect the activeness of users from different aspects at different quit status groups. Results For QuitNet Forum, 50% of users are at the early action stage of smoking cessation. They have been abstinent for less than three months. All users perform actively in communications and there is no significant difference on user activeness between different groups of quit status. For QuitNet Facebook, users have a wider range of quit status and they are distributed equally in different quit status groups. There are significant differences of user activeness between different groups. Several social network analysis metrics show that users of QuitNet Facebook at maintenance stage (quitted for six months to five years) are more active than users at early action stage (quitted for less than three months). Conclusion QuitNet Forum and QuitNet Facebook attract users with different characteristics of quit statuses. QuitNet Forum attracts more new quitters while QuitNet Facebook attracts equal number of users from all quit statuses. In addition, users on QuitNet Facebook with different quit statuses behave differently. The findings in this study show that users of online smoking cessation intervention program on different social media platforms behave differently. []