Short video marketing: what, when and how short-branded videos facilitate consumer engagement
Abstract
Purpose
This study explores whether and how four main factors of short-branded video content (content matching, information relevance, storytelling and emotionality) facilitate consumer engagement (likes, comments and shares), as well as the moderating effect of the release time (morning, afternoon and evening) in such relationships.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses Python to write programs to crawl relevant data information, such as consumer engagement and short video release time. It combines coding methods to empirically analyze the impact of short-branded video content characteristics on consumer engagement. A total of 10,240 Weibo short videos (total duration: 238.645 h) from 122 well-known brands are utilized as research objects.
Findings
Empirical results show that the content characteristics of short videos significantly affected consumer engagement. Furthermore, the release time of videos significantly moderated the relationship between the emotionality of short videos and consumer engagement. Content released in the morning enhanced the positive impact of warmth, excitement and joy on consumer engagement, compared to that released in the afternoon.
Practical implications
The findings provide new insights for the dissemination of products and brand culture through short videos. The authors suggest that enterprises that use brand videos consider content matching, information relevance, storytelling and emotionality in their design.
Originality/value
From a broader perspective, this study constructs a new method for comprehensively evaluating short-branded video content, based on four dimensions (content matching, information relevance, storytelling and emotionality) and explores the value of these dimensions for creating social media marketing success, such as via consumer engagement.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This project is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (72272061; 71802097; 72072110); Major Program of National Fund of Philosophy and Social Science of China (18ZDA063); The Ministry of Education of Humanities and Social Science project (22YJC630077); Philosophy and Social Sciences Planning Program of Guangzhou (2021GZYB05 and 2022JDGJ06); Research Institute on Brand Innovation and Development of Guangzhou (2021CS05); Jinan University Management School Funding Program (GY21013); Institute for Enterprise Development, Jinan University, Guangdong Province (2021MYZD04 and 2020CP03), Liikesivistysrahasto (210301); KAUTE Foundation (20200531) and Academy of Finland (337653).
Citation
Dong, X., Liu, H., Xi, N., Liao, J. and Yang, Z. (2023), "Short video marketing: what, when and how short-branded videos facilitate consumer engagement", Internet Research, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/INTR-02-2022-0121
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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