Continuous variable features.

Tourism short videos have become a crucial means for disseminating information and promoting tourism destinations, with user engagement directly impacting their spread and the long-term development of tourism industries. Taking Xi’an as a case study, this paper constructs a framework for influencing factors of user engagement in tourism short videos from three dimensions: content, society, and technology, based on the theory of communication ecology. By blending multiple regression analysis with fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), we explore the factors that influence user engagement in tourism short videos and further clarify the configurational causal relationships among these factors. This study found that: Content level (video type, scene quantity, scene representation, title sentence), social level (blogger type, blogger influence, blogger activity), and technological level (narrative way, background music, advertising information) significantly impact user engagement in tourism short videos. No single factor can solely constitute a necessary condition for promoting high user engagement. User engagement is actually the result of a combination of multiple factors. Notably, social level factors play a pervasive role in fostering active user engagement in tourism short videos. Further, fsQCA analysis identifies six conditional configurations that lead to high user engagement, categorizing them into three path types: content-driven, dual-dimensional co-driven, and comprehensive linkage. This study reveals the complex logic behind user engagement in tourism short videos, providing valuable insights for content marketing and promotional strategies of tourism short videos.