Social Media Engagement: Can Video Captions Increase User Engagement?

With short videos becoming one of the main subjects of social media, how to promote user engagement in social media videos has become a widely discussed topic. This paper reveals a relationship between captioning and viewer comprehension, and the degree of input to the creator, and combines the two with factors that influence the engagement phase of social media users. The impact of captions on social media user engagement was derived. Using quantitative research methods (i.e., questionnaires), the study invited 203 participants to join the experiment and ended up with 202 responses about whether their understanding of the video and the level of authorial input reflected in the captions influenced them to engage in the behavior. After analyzing the feedback, we can find that (1) subtitles can, to a certain extent, eliminate viewers’ misleading perceptions of the video content due to the actors’ accents, thus helping them understand the video content more deeply and indirectly enhancing social media user engagement. (2) Subtitles reflect the author’s level of dedication and commitment to the video product, and users can often discover the author’s level of dedication and thus make user engagement behaviors. Contribute to the research caption for the direction of social media user engagement.