Building Geolocated Business Inventories from Digital Trace Data: A Tobacco Retail Use Case

Thomas M. Menino Convention & Exhibition Center 

Digital trace data have become central to social science research, yet restricted platform access and data quality limitations complicate efforts to build reliable data collection pipelines. This study examines social media marketing by tobacco retailers, a task hindered by the lack of geolocation information in platform data, which prevents researchers from linking online marketing to local contexts. To overcome this limitation, we develop an innovative approach that identifies tobacco shops/vendors and their physical locations, and systematically links these entities to their online presence.

Using tobacco retailers as a case study, we present a generalizable framework that integrates Google Maps and Yelp listings and uses a hybrid record linkage strategy to construct geolocated, entity-level inventories. Associated social media accounts are identified and validated through manual review, enabling integration with population surveys to support spatial and inferential analyses. More broadly, this framework informs the development of sampling frames and analytic datasets in settings where traditional data sources are incomplete and platform access is rapidly evolving.

Digital trace data

Entity resolution

Record linkage

Geospatial data integration

Social media marketing

Survey data integration 

Social Statistics Section