Yanlin Li

TikTok—the world’s most downloaded app since 2020, has become a place for more than silly dancing and lip-syncing. TikTok users are increasingly turning to TikTok for news content. Meanwhile, news publishers are embracing TikTok to reach a younger audience. We aim to examine the content strategy adopted by the most-followed news publishers on TikTok and how effective their TikTok strategy is in spurring audience engagement in terms of liking, commenting, and sharing. This study retrieved 101,292 TikTok news videos as of November 22, 2022. With the help of computer vision, natural language processing, and sentiment analysis, we found that TikTok news videos containing negative sentiment and more second-person view shots are associated with significantly higher audience engagement. In addition, this study demonstrated that the TikTok video features and engagement levels differ between the news publishers and other TikTok creators. Moderator analysis shows that both the effect of negative sentiment on engagement and the effect of the second-person view on engagement are moderated by the TikTok account type. The impact of negative sentiment and second-person view on engagement behaviors becomes smaller or even insignificant for news publisher TikTok videos. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in this study.