Investigating Antecedents of Consumers Video-sharing Behavior on Social Media

Abstract

With the development of information technology, video-sharing social media emerges as a multimedia consumption and distribution channel among consumers. As sharing and recommendation behaviour by consumers makes significant influence among consumers, academic researchers and practitioners pay attention to antecedents of consumers' sharing behaviour on social media. However, in spite of proliferation of social media, there has been limited research on motivations and antecedents of consumers' video-sharing behaviour. From the perspectives of both viewer engagement and video contents, this research analyses 841 videos in music, movie and education channels on YouTube, which were publicised from July to October 2014. In terms of viewer engagement, we find out that average watching time, the number of comments and the ratio of like counts are positively related with the number of sharing videos. Also, we reveal that in terms of video contents, hedonic videos are more likely to be shared than utilitarian videos.