Information Foraging Behaviors in Fitness Livestreaming on TikTok

Fitness livestreaming rooms on TikTok have become a new type of gym for the public. Competition in the fitness livestreaming industry is becoming increasingly fierce. The reason why users select a certain livestreaming room remains ambiguous. Existing research has shown that information cues in live streams have a significant impact on user behavior. Users explore fitness livestreaming room on TikTok in an exploratory manner. Therefore, according to information foraging theory based on explaining exploratory search, this study constructs a model to investigate the impact of information cues in fitness livestreaming on user engagement behavior. Specifically, the study partitions live stream spaces into streamer patch and bullet comment patch. Aligning with human attention’s goal-driven selectivity, the information resources in each patch are categorized as fitness-related cues, social-related cues. and repeated cues named flooding comment which are irrelevant with goals but have notable stimulus. By analyzing the streamer’s conversation content, bullet comment, and real-time backend data from one fitness livestreaming, the study estimates the research model using multivariable linear regression model. The results indicate that the fitness and social information of the streamer’s conversation content, embedded in the bullet comment have positive impact on user engagement behavior, while flooding comment has a negative impact. For individuals with fitness goals, bullet comments have greater influence on user decisions than the streamer. The results of this study provide some practical inspiration for the development of fitness streamers and platforms.