TY - GEN A1 - Reichstein, Thomas A1 - Dost, Florian T1 - Attention please! How attention drives social media engagement T2 - Proceedings International Marketing Trends Conference 2024, Venice N2 - Social media has become an integral part of Internet usage, with billions of users worldwide. Therefore, it is increasingly important for marketers to understand how to optimize one of the most important variables for success: Engagement. This study examines the relationship between user attention and engagement on social media, considering the effect of caption text length and emojis. Using an eye-tracking experiment, we measure user attention and engagement (likes, clicks, comments) for 161 social media posts. Our results confirm that attention affects engagement. Furthermore, we show that text length and emojis moderate this relationship. This study makes an important contribution to understanding one of the most important mechanisms for driving engagement. KW - Eye-Tracking KW - Social Media KW - Engagement Y1 - 2024 UR - https://archives.marketing-trends-congress.com/2024/pages/PDF/37.pdf SN - 978-2-490372-18-8 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Reichstein, Thomas A1 - Dost, Florian A1 - Galle, Clara T1 - May I have your attention, please! Social Media Engagement does not always reflect user attention N2 - User engagement with social media content is the primary currency for social media marketers. An implicit assumption is that high engagement reflects high user attention to content. Surprisingly, this assumption has not been tested, and many users may only habitually engage with content without paying much attention to it. Using an eye-tracking experiment to examine subjects' gaze trajectories across 161 social media posts, we show that attention is indeed a strong predictor of engagement. However, the strength of the prediction is moderated by text length and emojis, with surprising results. Thus, the implicit assumption that engagement reflects attention is often misplaced. KW - Eye-Tracking KW - Social Media Engagement Y1 - 2024 UR - https://proceedings.emac-online.org/pdfs/A2024-119852.pdf ER -