The Influence of Text Variation on User Engagement in Cross-Platform Content Sharing

TL;DR

This study investigates how rewriting YouTube video titles for Reddit posts influences user engagement, revealing that emotionally resonant and community-aligned titles improve interaction, validated through large-scale analysis and predictive modeling.

Contribution

It introduces a controlled experimental framework and a fine-tuned BERT model to quantify the impact of textual variations on engagement in cross-platform social media content.

Findings

Title rewrites improve engagement metrics.

Effective titles feature emotional resonance and lexical richness.

BERT-based ranking achieves 74% accuracy in predicting engagement.

Abstract

In today's cross-platform social media landscape, understanding factors that drive engagement for multimodal content, especially text paired with visuals, remains complex. This study investigates how rewriting Reddit post titles adapted from YouTube video titles affects user engagement. First, we build and analyze a large dataset of Reddit posts sharing YouTube videos, revealing that 21% of post titles are minimally modified. Statistical analysis demonstrates that title rewrites measurably improve engagement. Second, we design a controlled, multi-phase experiment to rigorously isolate the effects of textual variations by neutralizing confounding factors like video popularity, timing, and community norms. Comprehensive statistical tests reveal that effective title rewrites tend to feature emotional resonance, lexical richness, and alignment with community-specific norms. Lastly, pairwise ranking prediction experiments using a fine-tuned BERT classifier achieves 74% accuracy, significantly outperforming near-random baselines, including GPT-4o. These results validate that our controlled dataset effectively minimizes confounding effects, allowing advanced models to both learn and demonstrate the impact of textual features on engagement. By bridging quantitative rigor with qualitative insights, this study uncovers engagement dynamics and offers a robust framework for future cross-platform, multimodal content strategies.