Overview The new millennium has ushered in a wave of synthetic, caffeinated high-energy drinks targeted at the youth market. Over the past 10 years, the consumption of caffeinated beverages intended...

Overview The new millennium has ushered in a wave of synthetic, caffeinated high-energy drinks targeted at the youth market. Over the past 10 years, the consumption of caffeinated beverages intended to “energise” has increased significantly. Energy drinks were recently shown to comprise 20% of the total convenience store beverage market, with “Red Bull” and “V” accounting for over 97% of sales in this multimillion-dollar industry. Increasingly, toxicity from caffeine overdose is being reported to hospitals and poisons centers (Gunja and Brown 2012). The aim of this assessment task is to identify and report on the quantitative measures and content of messages related to energy drinks on Twitter. Preparatory task Familiarise yourself with Twitter by creating your own account Identify, download and skim-read: Burton, Dadich and Soboleva (2013)* Choose any energy drink brand The chosen brand/company must have an official (corporate) Twitter account in USA or Australia The chosen brand’s Twitter accounts must have a minimum level of activity – that is, on average one tweet a day in the past three months Download and save the first 100 English-language tweets generated from the search The brand chosen is Red Bull.Download first 100 tweets from red bull twitter account and report is to be made on that. In line with the measures used by Burton, Dadich and Soboleva (2013)* analyse your chosen brand’s Twitter account on the basis of: Account Activity and Connectedness Efficiency of Communication Influence Interactivity iNote: You need to define these measures based on existing literature and report the extent of these activities by your chosen company analysing their contents. This may involve categorising Tweets in terms of these variables, analysing information and describing Twitter activities of your chosen company based on your analysis. Is there any other form of quantitative analysis which can be undertaken to analyse the Twitter accounts? (You may wish to refer to some other journal articles to see if any further type of quantitative analysis needs to be undertaken). *Burton, Dadich and Soboleva (2013), ‘Competing Voices: Marketing and Counter-Marketing Alcohol on Twitter’; Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing, vol. 25, pp. 186-209. Additional Reading: Burton, Soboleva and Khan (2014) Smoke spots: promoting smoking with social media; Tobacco Control.