Content creation platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Bilibili have become arenas where social media entrepreneurs can generate revenue by promoting users to engage with their creative works. While reconfiguring popular topics is a prevalent content creation strategy on these platforms, there is limited knowledge regarding whether or not using popular topics guarantees users’ engagement. Based on the “wanting-liking” framework, the present study aims to investigate the influence of using popular topics on user engagement. Utilizing 300,367 posts from a prominent content creation platform, we find that using popular topics is negatively associated with users’ attention (i.e., number of views). Additionally, there exists an inverted U-shaped correlation between using popular topics and users’ endorsement, indicating that moderate level of using popular topics is more favorable in terms of users’ endorsement. This study contributes to the body of knowledge about digital entrepreneurship in the context of content creation platforms and offers a more nuanced understanding toward the relationship between content creation strategy and different types of user engagement. It underscores the importance of strategically choosing topics for creative works in order to optimize user engagement.
