Title matters: Impacts of titles on user engagement in short video platforms

• Main Author: CHEN, Hao
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2023
• Subjects: short video titles; title length; emoji usage; sentiment strength; viewer engagement; Broadcast and Video Studies; Business Administration, Management, and Operations
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/etd_coll/479; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/etd_coll/article/1477/viewcontent/GPBA_AY2016_DBA_Chen_Hao.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

With the increasing popularity of short video marketing in business world, understanding how to engage short video viewers has attracted the attention from both academics and practitioners. Prior studies on short videos mainly focus on how characteristics of users or the attributes of video content affect marketing effectiveness. As a heuristic cue of short video content, the video title is expected to grab viewers’ attention thereby playing an important role in influencing viewers’ attitudes towards the short video consumption. Drawing on signaling theory, I propose that the characteristics of short video titles, such as the length, the sentiment strength, and the use of emoji, can influence the viewers’ engagement. Using a large sample of short videos from Kwai platform, I conduct a series of empirical analyses and find that short videos with longer titles, or with titles in lower sentiment strength, or with titles containing emojis, receive more likes and comments from viewers. The results of quantile analysis show that these characteristics of titles play a stronger role in influencing the viewers’ engagement when the engagement level is low. I also conduct a further analysis to explore the moderating effects of titles on viewers’ engagement across different video characteristics (i.e., the video duration and the short video topics) and characteristics of video creator (i.e, the popularity and the productivity). All the results remain consistent across different robustness tests. I also discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.