Enhancing Audiences’ Engagement with Health Education Videos : Visual Call or Textual Call?

With the rising popularity of video-based social media, more and more doctors are utilizing them to provide health education videos and employing the call-to-action strategy to enhance video engagement. Although the effectiveness of the call-to-action has been established in customer-brand communication literature, it remains unknown how it affects engagement with health education videos. Drawing on multiple literature streams, we propose that visual call positively affects video engagement, while textual call has a negative effect. Additionally, the medical term use weakens the positive impact of visual call and strengthens the negative impact of textual call. Our analysis results support the positive impact of visual call and the negative effect of textual call on audiences’ liking and collecting behavior, which are contingent upon medical term use. Our study contributes to research on technology-mediated patient education and the literature on call-to-action and provides implications for doctors and platform managers.