The power of sound: The impact of auditory features in hotel short influencer-generated videos on viewer engagement

This study explores how auditory features—speech rate, pitch, loudness, emotional arousal, and emotional valence—affect viewer engagement with short influencer-generated videos (SIGVs) in the hotel industry. The analysis is based on a dataset of 6152 videos posted by 485 hotels on the Douyin platform. Using deep learning models and statistical techniques, the auditory characteristics of the videos were quantified and analyzed. The results reveal inverted U-shaped relationships between speech rate, pitch, loudness, emotional arousal, and viewer engagement, suggesting that moderate levels of these features lead to higher engagement. In contrast, emotional valence demonstrates a positive linear effect on viewer engagement, indicating that more positive emotional expressions enhance viewer engagement. This research fills a gap in hotel short video marketing literature by focusing on auditory features and introducing audio-mining techniques to the hospitality industry, providing valuable insights for optimizing audio content to improve viewer engagement.