Xiaohongshu is a lifestyle social media platform and consumer decision making hub with more than 300 million users. It is the only one of a few mainstream platforms that started from the local community. In the beginning, users focused on sharing overseas shopping experiences in the local community, and now the sharing of information about beauty, personal care, sports, travel, home, travel, hotels, and restaurants has touched all aspects of consumer experience and lifestyle. Today, the community has become a defensive wall for Xiaohongshu that other platforms cannot replicate easily.
In the past few years, some brands including Perfect Diary (完美日记), Zhong Xuegao (钟薛高), Xiaoxiandou (小仙炖), etc. have grown up on Xiaohongshu. Older brands such as Huili (回力), Pecho Ling (百雀羚), Dabaitu (大白兔), and Li Ning (李宁) have been loved by more young people through Xiaohongshu. Xiaohongshu has also become an important community for boosting new consumption and empowering new brands.
LV conducted the first live broadcast of the brand account through Xiaohongshu. The popularity value of the live broadcast room exceeded 6 million, and the interaction rate reached 33%. The strong exposure and in-depth interaction attracted more than 20,000 fans for the brand account.
In terms of gender distribution of Xiaohongshu users, women account for the vast majority (over 87%). In terms of age distribution, users under 30 account for nearly 70% of the platform population, among which users under 24 account for about 40%, and users aged 24-30 account for about 30%. First-tier cities have the largest number of Xiaohongshu users, accounting for 40.94%, but the total number of superimposed second- and third-tier cities is comparable to that of first-tier cities. So now you can conclude that the main user group of Xiaohongshu is young women living in big cities.
To effectively promote your brand or product in Xiaohongshu, you must understand the basic logic of this platform and know where your fans will see your content in order to achieve the best marketing outcome. The traffic logic of Xiaohongshu has two core points: content tag matching, social relationship recommendation. After Xiaohongshu posts are published, they will be marked with a series of tags by the system and tentatively recommended to fans who are interested in these tags. After the posts are pushed to fans, based on a series of interactive behaviors of the fans, internal scores are assigned to the notes to decide whether to continue pushing them to other fans. This scoring system is called CES (community engagement score) in Xiaohongshu.
CES = Clicks*1 + Bookmark*1 + Comments*4 + Reposts*4 + Follows*8
The interactive behavior of fans indirectly reflects the quality of the content of the posts. Even if there are not many fans, the posts will be recommended to more fans by the system on the premise of high-quality scores, forming a "stepped" algorithm recommendation. Posts with high scores will be further supported by traffic from Xiaohongshu site search and Baidu search. This type of traffic is very persistent, and the notes can maintain the growth of likes and comments after several years of posting. In addition to the content itself, the weight of the account itself is also very important. When your account has a certain number of fans, your posts will be recommended to your fans. When your fans like, they will be seen by their friends which creates a viral effect. Xiaohongshu itself is also an e-commerce platform. Many users come to Xiaohongshu just before they are about to make a purchase decision. It is fundamentally different from pan-entertainment platforms such as Douyin. Although it is difficult to create a traffic burst overnight, the probability of fans being attracted is extremely high, and the chance to convert a sales is very high.
1. The recommendation mechanism is centralized
On the homepage of Xiaohongshu, there are three TAGs, "Follow", "Discover" and "Nearby". "Follow" refers to the content of the account that the user actively follows, which is displayed here in a form similar to WeChat Moments;
"Discover" is the high-quality content actively pushed by Xiaohongshu according to the tags of the user's attention, such as makeup, skin care, pets, etc;
"Nearby" a location-based content information list.
Among them, "follow" and "discovery" are the most important content exposure channels. Therefore, either strive to attract followers and become KOLs, or create high-quality content to obtain platform recommendation traffic. The former is also the result of the latter, which means that high-quality contents are posted. It is possible to use a small blog to get the recommendation traffic of the platform without any fans, but also to accumulate its own fans through this process, thus becoming more and more influential like a snowball. The recommendation mechanism of Xiaohongshu is that after a post is published, the platform will push the post to target users who may be interested according to the user’s tag attributes, and then feedback based on the behavior of these users (like, favorite, comment, forward). Finally, the platform will decide whether to push the posts to a larger pool of people, which means to get more exposure.
2. High-quality content can get long-term and long-tail traffic
Everyday, millions of users search for topics and posts they are interested on Xiaohongshu. They are users who come with purpose. Hundreds of millions of users share their shopping experiences and lifestyles on Xiaohongshu, thus forming a powerful database of real users' word-of-mouth, and the personalized content recommendation provided by the KOL culture and platform algorithms have brought to a higher conversion rate.
Posts on Xiaohongshu can be continuously searched and recommended, and the exposure of the content continues to increase over time. This is the best signal that platform sends to high-quality content creators and also means your content can be exposed permanently on the platform, and the traffic is continuous for a long time.
Finally, let's talk about the five simple marketing skills of Xiaohongshu.
a. The recommendation rate of video content is higher
Publish as many video posts as possible. Recently, Xiaohongshu has made many iterations of updates to the platform. The trend of migration from image community to video community is very obvious, including changing the default user posting images to the default posting videos, and canceling the more textual content post feature. It is an indisputable fact that Xiaohongshu strongly encourages users to post video contents and gives more traffic recommendations. This may be because short videos can better enhance user stickiness as seen in Douyin or Kuaishou.
b. The first image is very important
When your posts are pushed to the discovery page, the images and a short line of text attract the user's eyeball. Therefore, it is better to capture all the key points in the first image, which can greatly improve the opening efficiency.
c. Set up catchy topics to trigger discussion
Comments have the highest weight compared to likes and bookmarks. Therefore, posts with more comments are more likely to be repeatedly recommended by the system. By guiding users to comment in the text to express their views or concerns about a certain problem, and seriously reply to each comment. At the same time, you can also deliberately set up controversial comments yourself, and push them to the top through likes, and then you can continuously receive continuous discussions from people who walk pass.
d. Content focus on vertical segmentation
The content focus should be vertically segmented. Don’t post everything. Unless you are a well-known internet celebrity and fans are happy to see your life, the average user just wants to see the high quality content you provide . Instead of telling others what you ate in the morning, tell them why you want to eat these in the morning.
e. Create a content matrix
Don't just have one account. The probability of one account becoming the head account is too low. Make a matrix of accounts. Create more accounts, and synchronize and refine the content flow. No matter how many fans you have, each post is equivalent to an exposure restart. If you have multiple accounts to produce and distribute content simultaneously, the probability of attracting fans and exposure is superimposed. When it comes to brand marketing, the precipitation efficiency of keywords will be higher. Therefore, if you plan to invest time in incubating your own content account or engaging KOL to produce content, you must involve more accounts.
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