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Introduction:Social networking services like Facebook are a major instrument of social interaction among individuals all over the world. Brazil is the third country with the most amount of Facebook users – about 76 million people and second in daily accesses – about 47 million. Among the Brazilian users, 47% are 13-24 years-old. For a while now Facebook accepts advertising in its pages, including that of alcohol beverages. The few restrictions applied to regular alcohol advertising in Facebook pages are even more difficult to enforce to the beer brands fan pages, that are easily available to anyone with a Facebook profile, including minors. The objective of this paper is to analyze the themes and strategies of the main Facebook pages of beer brands aiming to inform public policies and, specifically, future prevention efforts related to media literacy.
Methods:Eleven of the main beer brands in Brazil were selected. One of the key brands, Brahma, sponsors the national Brazilian soccer team as well as most of the most influential teams of the Brazilian soccer league. In this way, it displays several different profiles (e.g: “Brahma seleção” – related to the national team, “Brahma Flamengo”, related to one of the main Rio de Janeiro teams, etc.). The total number of beer pages followed were, then, 14 (three of them only for Brahma). The tool “alcohol digest” developed by the company CrowdTangle was used to collect the posts. The five main posts of the week (based on the amount of sharing, “likes” and commentaries) were selected during seventeen weeks from June/2013 to September/2013, resulting in a total of 85 posts. Following many prior months of preliminary collection and observation of alcohol posts and according to Nicholls´ (2012) and Gordon´s (2011) work, the posts where analyzed taking into account strategic trends and themes. The posts were analyzed by two researchers ensuring consistency in coding with a minimum level of agreement set at 85% - inconsistencies were discussed and solved with a third investigator.
Results:The several strategies and themes included sports (specially soccer), sexuality, national symbols and holidays, embedded in interactive games, competitions, sponsored and sometimes branded events, real-world tie-ins as well as direct suggestions to drink. The use of humour was very frequent.
Conclusion: Themes are similar to the ones used by traditional media, but the strategies allow a more dynamic “talk” and closer relationship to the public, what is especially attractive to young people. As the importance of social media to alcohol advertising increases and becomes a fact, public policies as well as prevention strategies such as media literacy should also focus in this approach.