"Here Comes the Makeup Tutorial You Asked For!": Exploring Communication Strategies and Viewer Engagement in Beauty Videos on Rednote

2025-08-14

AI Summary

This study investigates how beauty video creators on Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) enhance audience engagement and knowledge dissemination through strategic communication. Method: Based on content coding of 352 videos, we developed a taxonomy of communication strategies encompassing narrative structure, visual rhetoric, and interactive design; concurrently, comment-text annotation identified six audience feedback categories, and computational linguistics combined with multivariate regression modeling quantified associations between strategy features and comment-level interactions. Contribution/Results: We provide the first systematic empirical validation that specific strategies—particularly “end-of-video calls to action”—significantly increase efficacy-oriented discussion comments (p < 0.01), thereby establishing a quantifiable mechanistic link among creator behavior, audience feedback, and health-related knowledge propagation. These findings advance theoretical understanding of digital health communication and offer an evidence-based framework for creator content optimization.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Mining of Visual, Multimedia & Multimodal Data
• Humans and AI: Interaction Techniques and Devices

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Content-based information diffusion
• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy

Abstract

More and more people, especially females, create and view beauty videos covering topics like makeup tutorials and vlogs on social media platforms. Understanding the communication strategies that creators use in these videos and how they affect viewers' engagement can help spread beauty knowledge. By coding 352 beauty videos in Rednote, this study presents a comprehensive taxonomy of communication strategies used by the creators, such as using home as the video background and displaying makeup effects when starting the narrative at the beginning. We further label and computationally classify six categories of comments that reveal viewers' engagement with beauty videos. The regression analyses reveal the effects of beauty video communication strategies on viewers' engagement; for example, calling viewers to take action at the end tends to attract more comments that debate the product's efficacy. We discuss insights into fostering the creation of beauty videos and the communication of beauty knowledge.

Problem

• Analyze communication strategies in beauty videos
• Measure viewer engagement through comment categories
• Explore effects of strategies on engagement metrics

Innovation

• Coding 352 beauty videos for taxonomy
• Classifying six comment categories computationally
• Regression analyses on engagement effects