I cue you liking me: Causal and spillover effects of technological engagement bait

Abstract

Baiting user engagement is pervasive on social media platforms, and new strategies and tools have been developed to facilitate this engagement bait. However, the empirical effects and theoretical mechanisms are rarely examined. The present study formally explicates engagement bait based on the concept of cues and illustrates a strategy for luring user engagement in computer-mediated communication. Furthermore, combining matching and within-between models, we tested the causal effect of engagement bait on encouraging user engagement on a Chinese video-sharing platform, Bilibili, with a random sample of 188,249 users and their 1,810,787 videos. In addition to the significant direct effect on the bait-using video, our findings suggest a spillover effect that applying technological engagement bait can increase engagement with the bait user's other videos even if these videos did not use the bait function.