Xiaohongshu promotion and marketing guide, teach you to avoid 90% of the pitfalls

Facing the precise 200 million young female user groups of Xiaohongshu , you can’t just drool at the cake. You have to do something. I hope that your promotion on Xiaohongshu is not the kind of half-hearted one.

Here are some experiences I’ve learned. Reading for 10 minutes may save you more than $100,000.

NO.1 Water Army & Normal Users

Let’s talk about the water army. There are a lot of service providers like the one below that brush data. You can find a lot of them on Taobao or just find a third party. Don’t think that the water army is a small part. Wherever there is data, there will be water army.

Next, we randomly select a few Xiaohongshu KOLs, use the mobile app to open the KOL’s homepage, click on the fans, and you can see the KOL’s fan list.

Scroll down, usually about 10 times, and when you find all of these accounts, be alert.

Characteristics of the water army: non-mainstream nicknames, all aesthetic avatars, and the number of followers is generally more than three digits.

For normal users, it should be like the picture below. Some avatar nicknames have symbols because the users are too lazy to set them, so Xiaohongshu gives the default ones.

NO.2 High-quality KOL

Screening KOLs passes two levels, and reinvesting KOLs passes three levels:

1. Water army detection. Use the previous steps to check KOL to check the proportion of water army. It is considered to have passed the preliminary inspection only when no water army is found among 10,000 fans before the launch. (The list only shows 10 fans at a time. To check 10,000 fans, you have to swipe 1,000 times. Don’t think it’s troublesome. Compared with the cost of advertising, swiping through the fan list for 10 minutes is nothing. Facts have also proved that not many KOLs can withstand the test of having more than 10,000 real fans.)

2. Interaction data: Analyze the content of the recently updated notes and check whether there are any abnormalities in the interaction data according to the following methods.

a. Amazing, funny, short and meaningful ones will get a lot of likes.

b. There will be more comments on controversial, emotionally resonant, extremely uncomfortable, and those that cause large emotional fluctuations.

c. Practical types, strategy types, tutorial types, and knowledge types will have a relatively large number of reposts.

d. Except for some special cases mentioned above, in most cases, Collection>Like>Comment&Repost.

3. Execute docking

a.Service attitude: sincerity, recognition and cooperation.

b. Professional skills: conceiving framework, writing copy, shooting, and photo editing.

c. Conversion awareness: We will find ways to balance fans’ content preferences and products, and provide comment guidance to help Party A achieve conversions as much as possible.

NO.3 Low-quality KOL

Confused quotations, poor professional skills, poor sense of responsibility, easily emotional, blindly compromising with the client's advertising requirements and ineffective suggestions. These bad situations are mostly caused by the following two points:

a. Fan data is all inflated, and the mentality is to make every possible profit.

Because they don’t have to consider the feelings of their fans (because they don’t have real fans at all), they make random quotes and the sponsors can write whatever they want as long as it doesn’t violate the rules (and they don’t have the professional ability to give good suggestions). However, this kind of blind coordination is not good cooperation, but inefficiency!

b. It’s too easy to make money

The unprofessionalism of advertisers has brought many business opportunities to these fake KOLs. The easy money has created a character of high expectations but low skills .

Various negative aspects followed, such as random quotations, poor sense of responsibility, and emotionality. Most KOLs in the market were criticized, mostly because of the wrong choice of KOLs or the unprofessionalism of advertisers.

The cooperation with KOL is actually more like finding a partner rather than buying and selling . If you choose the right one, it will be a strong alliance, but if you choose the wrong one, it will cause chaos for everyone.

In addition to the above two points, because it has been difficult to increase the number of comments on Xiaohongshu for a long time, many low-quality KOLs have begun to set up WeChat groups to keep each other warm and comment and like each other. If you see that the comments on the KOL promotion notes are all from some experts, then nine out of ten times, it is water! (In addition to the difficulty in brushing comments, it is also difficult to brush the number of readings)

NO.4 Platform traffic mechanism (key point)

If you want to do a good job of promotion on the Xiaohongshu channel, it is essential to understand the traffic mechanism of Xiaohongshu.

The unchanging feature of the channel traffic mechanism is " change ". The mechanism will continue to evolve and upgrade over time, just like Baidu's algorithm. With the development of technology and the increase in the amount of information and users, the mechanism is also being updated and iterated. At this stage, there is basically a small change every month and a big change every quarter. What we need to do is to adapt to the mechanism to achieve twice the result with half the effort.

The following is a summary of the current traffic mechanism experience after the recent launch of Xiaohongshu.

a. Different people have different faces. After a note is published, the official will identify the original quality of the note. Once the official quality of the note is qualified, it will flow into the public domain (if the content of the note is included in the search, it has entered the public domain). If the note cannot even enter the public domain, it cannot be recommended.

b. Weight mechanism. When notes flow into the public domain, the platform will expose them to different people based on user preferences. The higher the account weight, the higher the priority and the more exposure it will get. The weight is related to registration time, number of notes, activity, number of fans, number of likes and favorites, number of comments and reposts, etc.

High-weight features: Complete account information, unified header image style, complete image and text structure, no illegal content on the homepage and comment area, recent notes, and more interactions .

c. Traffic sources: The traffic sources of a note are mainly from discovery, keyword search, fans, topics, and nearby.

Factors affecting discovery exposure: user demand popularity associated with the note content, publishing time, publishing account weight, and content interaction volume.

Number of fan exposures: fan stickiness and fan activity (real fans).

Topic traffic exposure: topic popularity, release time, matching degree (based on platform algorithm), interaction volume,

Keyword search exposure: matching degree (based on platform algorithm), account weight, interaction volume,

Release time: 12:30 to 14:00 noon, 17:30 to 20:30 pm from Sunday to Thursday, and 21:00 to 23:30 from Friday to Saturday.

Relatively speaking, traffic distribution on weekdays is more concentrated, while traffic on weekends is larger but more dispersed. Posting during the hours of high user activity at noon and in the evening will result in higher exposure than posting at other times. (Although not necessarily much higher)

NO.5 Content Quality (Key Point)

The purpose of promoting products on Xiaohongshu is to generate product recognition, brand recognition, purchase associations and word-of-mouth sharing among consumers. If you want good results, you must pay attention to the quality of the content. If you throw the same content in front of consumers, then what consumers will give back to you will also be the same communication effect.

Compared with other platforms, content marketing on Xiaohongshu requires not only the content itself to have in-depth value, but also to cater to the platform's traffic mechanism.

So, what details should we pay attention to? Let’s take a look at these data first.

Exposures and readings,

Exposure refers to the number of times the platform exposes a note based on its content through discovery, nearby, topics, fans, keyword searches, etc.

The reading number is the number of times UVs click into the note from the list ( one IP can only provide one reading number per day ).

To achieve the effect of planting seeds, we need to consider getting as much exposure as possible on the one hand, and attracting as many users as possible to read on the other hand.

Therefore, the first step in pushing content to users is to create a header image and title, which is particularly important.

A good headline image and title can have an opening rate of about 20%-30%, while a bad headline and title can have an opening rate of less than 10%, or even less than 5%.

In order to achieve the effect of planting seeds, we need users to consume content, and the number of readings is the best data assessment standard.

The exposure that was hard-earned was lost due to the header image and title. It can be described as a boat capsizing in a gutter.

Here are some recommended notes.

There are a wide variety of header images and titles. If the title of your content is ordinary, how can you get consumers to buy it?

Here are some tried and tested practical tips for header images.

a. Stunning and desirable scene pictures. The pictures should be exquisite and the scenes should be what most users desire. They can be scenery, certain moments or certain plots.

b. Expose the pain points directly. The severity of the pain points should match the pain points of most users. Don’t be too severe or too painless.

c. Directly display the renderings, pain points and results. The greater the contrast, the better, without being too exaggerated.

d. Display the core value of the content. If it is useful information, tutorials, etc., directly place the value of the content prominently in the header image.

After talking about exposure and reading numbers, and knowing the importance of headlines and titles, let’s take a look at the reading numbers of articles from two amateur accounts.

One is an account that gained more than 500 followers by following each other, and the other is an account with only 26 followers, but the number of article readings is as high as more than 3,000 and more than 5,000. According to the proportion, more than 3,000 and more than 5,000 readings have at least 10,000 exposures. Therefore, when the content is good enough, the platform will give corresponding exposure rewards.

The purpose of paying KOLs to run advertisements should be to take advantage of the KOLs’ high weight and fans’ popularity to get more exposure and reading, so as to achieve the goal of planting grass, rather than just planning content and promoting it to the KOLs’ fans just because the KOLs have many fans. The marketing focus of Xiaohongshu is not on the KOLs’ fans, but on the content itself . The value of KOLs lies in the ability to take advantage of the KOLs’ high weight accounts and fans’ high interaction data to cater to the platform’s traffic rules to get more recommended exposure, topic exposure, keyword exposure, fan exposure, etc.

When it comes to content writing skills, picture skills, and text skills, that’s another basket of details, and it mainly depends on how to use them flexibly in accordance with the product and platform rules.

NO.6 Be a professional party A

Not every KOL knows the platform well enough. Some KOLs become famous just by writing.

It is not the KOL with good daily notes data that can make promotion notes as good as the daily updated data. After all, in addition to the content value, excellent promotion notes must also be combined with conversion skills.

Not every KOL is arrogant, sometimes it’s just a lack of guidance.

Therefore, be an advertiser who can produce professional briefs, be an advertiser who can provide professional revision suggestions, be an advertiser who can review manuscripts professionally, be an advertiser with strong coordination skills, and be an advertiser who is good at analyzing data. If you are not good at any of these, find a professional and reliable third party.

The above is the experience sharing of recent launches

Author: I am Xiao D

Source: I am Xiao D

Related reading:

1. Complete promotion and operation plan for Xiaohongshu!

2. Tips for using Xiaohongshu’s copywriting to promote products: code first and read later!

3. For promotion on Xiaohongshu, just read this article.

4. Xiaohongshu promotion: Xiaohongshu user growth methodology!

5.How to promote on Xiaohongshu? 2 program steps!

6.4 major strategies + 7 major skills, a comprehensive interpretation of Xiaohongshu promotion strategy!

7. 11 core strategies for operating and promoting Xiaohongshu!

8.Case analysis: Xiaohongshu advertising strategy!