TEMPORAL TRENDS ANALYSIS ON DIET AND LIFESTYLE DISCOURSE OF TWITTER USERS: INSIGHTS OF PLANT-BASED DIET AND VEGANISM

Social media have experienced rapid growth in recent years, providing a great opportunity to gain spontaneous information on current and emerging topics, which has attracted wide attention from marketing researchers and consumer studies. In line with this, new lifestyles and eating habits have been widely discussed among an increasingly conscious and concerned public about the foods they consume. In this sense, the present work aimed to understand the perception of Twitter users about veganism and plant-based diets, during the period from February 2018 to February 2019, by downloading the keywords “vegan”, “vegan food”, “veganism”, “plant-based food”, “plant-based diet”, “plant-based nutrition”, appearing in text or hashtags as selection criteria, via the Twitter Streaming Application Programming Interface (API). Prior to content analysis, retweets and duplicate posts from the final analytic sample were excluded to increase the likelihood that topics examined reflected the original content produced by users. Randomly, 1000 tweets for each group were selected and classified using inductive coding on themes and subthemes according to their content. Significant differences between groups were analyzed using the global Chi-square test, and their sources of variation investigated by chi-square per cell test using XLSTAT. Results indicate that content of veganism-related tweets is strongly tied to marketing, philosophy-aligned recipes, political activism, and animal welfare, with examples of terms like: names of businesses, pizza and other vegan foods, and speeches against animal exploitation, respectively, while posts reporting plant-based diets have been more closely linked to healthier lifestyle and their impacts on consumer health (well-being, longevity, quality of life). In conclusion, Twitter has proved to be an interesting tool to obtain data about (re)produced food discourses on social media and its results can guide the market and the academic environment in the creation of new products, services and marketing strategies to meet the needs of specific consumers.