UNSTRUCTURED
China is the largest and fastest-growing market of milk formula products and has a highly active digital media environment. Weibo is one of the most popular social media channels in China. The International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes aims to prevent aggressive marketing practices to protect mothers and babies. The advent of Weibo presents new challenges for the promotion, protection, and support of breastfeeding in China. The study aims 1) Investigate the frequency of posting by popular milk formula brands on Weibo 2) Uncover common Weibo post themes and marketing techniques used by milk formula brands and companies. We examined the four most popular milk formula brands' official Weibo accounts: Biotime, Mead Johnson, YiLi-Prokido and Friso, each had more than 1.4 million followers. We developed a preliminary coding framework with coding categories based on previous studies. Initially, we coded one hundred original posts from each account using an iterative process of coding. The final set of ten coding categories were mutually exclusive. Totaling 2,667 original posts were coded and analyzed. Three categories had the highest proportions of original posts (65%) across the four accounts; they were: increase user engagement (939/2667, 35.2%), parenting advice (516/2667, 19.3%), and celebrity endorsement (327/2667, 12.3%). The remaining seven categories, including claims that milk formula is very close to breast milk, fear appeals of breastfeeding, sponsorship or title sponsor of event/TV reality shows, accounted for 35% of the total number of original posts. This study revealed that advertising practices were common, particularly prizes, parenting advice, and celebrity endorsement of milk formula products in milk formula brands' Weibo accounts. Therefore, monitoring and regulation to ban digital media advertising of milk formula in China are urgently needed.