Cold start analysis of Xiaohongshu

1. Product Description

1.1 Product Introduction

As of October 15, 2018, there are more than 150 million young users around the world sharing their lifestyles of eating, dressing, playing and shopping on the Xiaohongshu app.

In the Xiaohongshu community, users record their wonderful lives and share their lifestyles through sharing text, pictures, and video notes.

1.2 Product Positioning

Xiaohongshu provides attractive and valuable content for young women who do not have clear purchasing goals, and provides a sharing platform for young women who like to share their lifestyles and shopping experiences. Xiaohongshu creates a UGC community atmosphere by complementing the needs of content producers and content consumers.

At the same time, the platform uses the e-commerce model of connecting consumers and products with content, cultivates user consumption needs, and enables consumers to make purchases through content recommendations and guidance.

1.3 User Demand Analysis

(1) User Profile

From the user portrait analysis index of Xiaohongshu provided by iResearch data, we can know that:

The proportion of female users of Xiaohongshu is much higher than that of male users, and female users are the main force;

The age of users is mainly distributed among the young people born in the 1980s and 1990s, among which the 24-35-year-olds account for the largest proportion, accounting for nearly 60%;

Users are mainly distributed in first- and second-tier cities. In terms of provinces, Guangdong Province has the highest proportion.

The main hobbies of using apps are online shopping, life, and information, and the user consumption level is medium to high.

To sum up, it can be inferred that Xiaohongshu’s target users are mainly young women, concentrated in first- and second-tier cities, with a medium to high consumption level.

(2) User characteristics

Basic attributes: Young women aged between 26 and 35. As the main force in product content production and consumption, women generally have received higher education and are concentrated in first- and second-tier cities.

Consumption characteristics: like shopping, sharing, and enjoying life, with a medium to high consumption level.

Behavioral characteristics:

Consumer behavior: shopping, life, financial management

Social behavior: Willing to share personal lifestyle, recommend high-quality products, share shopping experiences, etc.

Psychological characteristics: like to share personal life, love to show personality and pursue quality life, hope to get attention, have a desire to show off

(3) User needs

Users with clear shopping goals hope to get relevant product reviews and analysis to determine whether the product is worth buying

Users who do not have a clear shopping goal hope to get relevant recommendations and find products they like

They have the need to share their personal lives and recommend high-quality products, and hope to satisfy their desire to show off and socialize by sharing their shopping experiences.

(4) Solution

In terms of core functions, Xiaohongshu provides users with community functions and shopping mall functions based on product positioning and user needs in order to meet user needs. The community function is based on users' willingness to share shopping experiences, recommend products worth purchasing, share product evaluation and trial experiences, and guide user consumption. Shopping malls are helpful in helping users complete the final purchase and achieve the ultimate goal of content monetization.

From the product's visual layout and interaction, it can also be seen that Xiaohongshu's business model is to connect consumers and products through content.

(5) Usage scenarios

Before shopping, users check the relevant shopping experience of the product they want to buy to understand whether it is worth buying, whether it is suitable for them, and whether it has the effect they want.

Before traveling, users learn about hotel information, tourist attractions, product recommendations worth buying, and product experiences they want to buy in the place they are going to visit.

After shopping and traveling, I want to share my shopping tips and travel experiences to mark my lifestyle and show my personality.

1.4 Product Analysis

(1) Product structure

(2) User usage process

User note publishing process

Users publish notes through the "Publish" button in the bottom tab bar. The main users of the product are women. Taking into account the young women's love of beauty, the product allows users to choose the "filter and beauty" function when publishing notes to satisfy the young women's love of beauty.

In addition, you can directly add labels and stickers when posting notes to make the published content more personalized and fashionable, fully satisfying the desire of young women to show their individuality.

In addition, when posting notes, you can also choose to join a topic to increase the activity of the product community content.

User browsing notes operation process

There are two situations when users browse notes:

① Users have a clear goal orientation and directly go to the homepage - search bar - enter the search keyword to search and browse.

② The user does not have a clear goal orientation . At this time, the user can browse the discovery page (the system recommends content of interest to the user based on big data algorithms), or the user can choose to enter the follow page to browse the latest updates of the person they follow, or enter the nearby page to browse the updates of nearby people.

User Mall Shopping Operation Process

In addition to searching for the products they want to purchase in the mall and placing orders, users can also enter the details page of the product introduced in the note by browsing the note (this operation process is not explained here), thereby increasing the conversion rate of user orders.

(3) Product function analysis

Home page features

The first thing presented when entering the homepage of Xiaohongshu is the feed flow recommendation entrance (discovery page), which can be seen as the key entrance to the Xiaohongshu community. Judging from its position in the functional module, it is in a relatively important position and is also a core function.

The purpose of this function is to quickly guide users to become familiar with the community and reduce the time it takes for users to gain cognition and familiarity.

At the same time, entering the homepage means entering the discovery page. The discovery page is where the system recommends preferences based on big data algorithms such as user behavior characteristics, further solving the problem for users who "do not have a clear purchasing goal". It can be seen that Xiaohongshu is particularly friendly to this type of users.

Mall shopping function

After the home page, the mall shopping function comes next, which is an additional function.

At this stage, Xiaohongshu has entered into a business model that connects content with products. Therefore, the mall is the final step in realizing content monetization, and the mall helps to achieve product conversion. However, the core function of Xiaohongshu is still the content community.

Release note function

From the bottom tab bar of Xiaohongshu, we can see that the visual design of the note-posting function focuses on the publish button, visually guiding users to pay attention to the publish button and guiding users in their publishing behavior.

Because Xiaohongshu is a community built on UGC, as long as users can continuously update and publish notes, increase the richness of community content, and improve the quantity and quality of content, it is very important to increase the activity of the community.

Therefore, this function is more prominent in visual and interactive design.

Messaging

From the location of the message function, it can be seen that this function is an additional function, which mainly serves to prompt and display some messages.

However, this function plays a certain role in guiding sharing and activating the community for users who like to share notes, because users who like to share are concerned about personal attention. They hope to get attention or show their personality. Therefore, the message function is laid out on the bottom tab bar as a first-level function, which is different from other apps that place the message function in a deeper path.

(4) Product business logic

From the above figure, we can see the relationship between the content producers and content consumers of a product. Most ordinary users are content consumers, and most of the note-taking experts are content producers. Through the creation, editing, organization and presentation of content by content producers, community content is continuously enriched and the quantity and quality of community content are improved.

At the same time, through a series of active community actions, content consumers constantly browse and read notes, and continue to follow, like, comment and share note masters or high-quality content.

The Xiaohongshu community continues to operate in a healthy manner through a continuous cycle of operations between content producers and content consumers.

II. Current Situation

2.1 Product Life Cycle

Xiaohongshu APP was launched in October 2013. As of October 2018, after 5 years of growth, Xiaohongshu has quickly become the world's largest consumer category word-of-mouth database and community e-commerce platform, and has become a must-have "shopping tool" for more than 70 million young consumers in more than 200 countries and regions.

As can be seen from the curve chart, in just one year, the number of Android user downloads of Xiaohongshu has exploded at a rate of nearly 4 times from 90 million at the end of October 2017. As of the end of October 2018, the number of Android user downloads of Xiaohongshu has reached 380 million.

From this, it can be judged that Xiaohongshu APP is in a period of rapid product growth. Users are becoming more and more familiar with the product, the number of users is growing rapidly, and the product is growing rapidly.

2.2 Content Type, Quantity and Source

From 2013 to now, Xiaohongshu has gone through a process from cold start, which only served female users who went to Hong Kong for shopping, to female users who bought goods of interest overseas, to online shoppers who bought cross-border goods without leaving home, and then to today's Xiaohongshu APP's slogan - "Mark my life", a sharing platform mainly for sharing lifestyles.

It can be seen that the target user scale of Xiaohongshu has been expanding, so the content direction is also becoming wider and more numerous.

Type and amount of content

Judging from the current content of Xiaohongshu, it covers 18 topics including fashion, skin care, makeup, celebrities, etc. The content of the topics is basically consistent with the user group positioning, and is mainly related to young women.

Source of content

Xiaohongshu’s current content sources mainly come from three types: UGC, PGC, and PUGC represented by celebrity KOLs and expert KOLs.

UGC, user-generated content. This part of content accounts for a large proportion and is the main source of content for Xiaohongshu.

PGC, professional content production. This part of the content is created, organized and managed by Xiaohongshu officially. It is divided according to the classification of content topics and has opened multiple vertical official accounts.

PUGC, professional user generated content. This type of users can be further divided into three categories. The first type is the expert team invited from other MCN platforms; the second type is the expert users cultivated by Xiaohongshu itself. These expert users are the core users of Xiaohongshu and provide a large amount of high-quality content; the last type is the celebrity KOL. Using the influence of celebrities for endorsement has brought in a large number of fans and users.

When Fan Bingbing first joined Xiaohongshu, it caused a huge impact. All the products recommended by Fan Bingbing were sold out online and offline on Xiaohongshu, which undoubtedly proved that using the influence of celebrities for endorsement is a good strategy.

2.3 User Groups and Activity

Product User Group

According to the user portrait analysis index of Xiaohongshu provided by iResearch data above, the majority of Xiaohongshu users are female, with a male-to-female ratio of about 2:8. Female users cannot resist topics such as shopping, food, and fashion. They are more willing to share such life content, which can easily create a dissemination effect.

These female users are between 24 and 35 years old, accounting for about 70%. Although according to the data provided by iResearch, the largest user group of Xiaohongshu is users born after 1990, it cannot be ruled out that more and more people born after 1995 will flock to Xiaohongshu. According to the "Research Report on App Behavior of College Students in April 2018" released by Aurora Big Data, Xiaohongshu has the highest preference index among college students' online shopping app preference index rankings.

In terms of geographical distribution, Xiaohongshu users are concentrated in economically developed first- and second-tier regions such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhejiang and Shanghai, among which Guangdong Province accounts for the largest proportion of users. Therefore, in terms of spending power, Xiaohongshu’s users generally have an upper-middle level of spending power, and this group of people accounts for nearly 90% in total. This may also be related to the fact that Xiaohongshu’s early community content was mainly focused on outbound shopping.

To sum up, Xiaohongshu's user base is generally concentrated in economically developed first- and second-tier regions such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhejiang and Shanghai. Their spending power is generally medium to high. The main force of users are mostly young women born after 1990 who are interested in topics such as shopping, food and fashion. The user base is becoming younger and younger, and a large number of fresh blood born after 1995 are pouring into Xiaohongshu.

Product user activity

According to the "2017 Latest Cross-border E-commerce App TOP5 Ranking" released by iResearch, in 2017, Xiaohongshu ranked first among cross-border e-commerce apps with a monthly active user base of 15.3947 million, and its active users increased by 4.47% month-on-month.

However, according to the "China Cross-border E-commerce Market Research Report for the Second Quarter of 2018" released by Bidachun Consulting in 2018, Xiaohongshu ranked first in the second quarter of 2018 with an average monthly active user base of 20.071 million, far exceeding the second-ranked Kaola by three times.

From this, we can see that the monthly active users of Xiaohongshu are rising steadily to become the first among cross-border e-commerce apps, and Xiaohongshu is growing rapidly at an explosive rate.

2.4 Trends and rankings

From the Xiaohongshu search index trend and ranking trend curve provided by Qimai, we can see that Xiaohongshu's search index is stable at an average of around 9,600, and it ranks high in both shopping app rankings and social app rankings. It can be seen that the influence of Xiaohongshu APP cannot be ignored.

2.5 Operational Strategy

Based on the previous analysis of Xiaohongshu’s life cycle, Xiaohongshu is currently in a period of rapid growth.

For products at this stage, operations focus on the product's growth model and speed, so operations often adopt strategies such as event marketing, advertising, and user subsidies to enable products to seize the market more quickly and accelerate growth.

From the growth curve of Xiaohongshu's Android user downloads from 2015 to 2018, we can see that the number of user downloads exceeded 100 million in November 2017, and then the number of user downloads increased at a crazy rate, almost 4 times the rate, from 100 million in November 2017 to 550 million in December 2018 in just one year.

Below I will select several growth turning points and peaks, and list the operational activities and strategies implemented by Xiaohongshu during the corresponding periods.

In November 2015, Xiaohongshu launched the unique "Red Friday" event to attract customers during Black Friday. With the theme of "I don't want the whole world, I just want the good things in the world", during the event, you can enjoy the highest discount that only happens once a year, and all overseas direct mail products will be free of shipping. In conjunction with online activities, Xiaohongshu also launched offline activities such as "One Yuan Luxury Package" and "Xiaohongshu Bus" to push the event to a climax. It also forms a closed loop from online to offline activities, increasing the influence of the activities.

In the second half of 2016, Xiaohongshu expanded its third-party platforms and brand merchants, and its SKUs in all product categories grew rapidly.

In April 2017, Lin Yun joined Xiaohongshu, marking the first time that a celebrity had joined Xiaohongshu. It can also be seen from the growth curve that the number of downloads by Xiaohongshu users began to show an inflection point in April 2017.

In June 2017, Xiaohongshu’s third “66th Anniversary Sale” achieved sales of over 100 million within 2 hours of the start of sales. Xiaohongshu’s users exceed 50 million.

In November 2017, Fan Bingbing made a high-profile entry into Xiaohongshu, which also represented that Xiaohongshu had entered a period of explosive growth in celebrity traffic. Whenever Fan Bingbing recommends a product, its sales skyrocket and it is sold out without exception. As can be seen from the growth curve, in November 2017, the number of user downloads exceeded 100 million, and the number of new users of Xiaohongshu also reached a small peak.

In January and April 2018, as the fan economy expanded, Xiaohongshu sponsored two variety shows, "Idol Producer" and "Produce 101". Because the variety shows brought Xiaohongshu extremely high exposure, Xiaohongshu users entered a stage of blowout growth.

As of November 2018, with more and more celebrities joining Xiaohongshu, the number of Xiaohongshu users is growing steadily, and the number of celebrities who have joined Xiaohongshu has now exceeded 150.

In summary, it is not difficult to find that during the rapid growth period, Xiaohongshu successfully brought explosive growth to the product by leveraging celebrity influence, popular online variety show events, advertising, event planning and other operational means, allowing a large number of potential users to develop into new users of the product.

3. Cold Start Strategy

After analyzing Xiaohongshu’s current situation and products above, we may wonder how Xiaohongshu has developed from 0 to a community with tens of millions of active users? How did Xiaohong do the cold start? Where do their seed users come from?

Next, I will analyze Xiaohongshu’s cold start strategy from two perspectives: product and content.

3.1 Product perspective

(1) Initial users of the content

Looking back at the first two years of Xiaohongshu’s establishment, we can find that Xiaohongshu did not invest a penny in advertising. So how do they find the nicknames of their seed users?

In September and October 2013, the PC version and APP of Xiaohongshu were launched respectively. The initial stage of product launch is in the product exploration phase, which is the so-called introduction phase. The focus of product operations at this stage is to build word of mouth, thereby promoting dissemination and making the product popular as quickly as possible.

Therefore, Xiaohongshu used "Hong Kong" as the initial entry point for the product, and the initial user positioning was "female users who plan to go to Hong Kong for shopping."

(2) Content supply chain architecture

After Xiaohongshu determined the entry point and initial user positioning of the product, they quickly determined the content supply chain architecture to better output high-quality content and serve initial users.

Content consumer positioning

Product positioning: push various shopping guide related content

Audience positioning: Only for women who plan to go shopping in Hong Kong

Operational goal: to establish user reputation and quickly spread the word

Content source confirmation

Content collection: In the early stage, it was mainly PGC, mostly from Xiaohongshu content editors and official originals

Source channel: data collection, arrangement and editing

Content standards established

Evaluation criteria: Comprehensive shopping strategies that can impress users

Incentive mechanism: work is assigned in the form of tasks. The editor assigns a certain amount of tasks, audits, and invited experts every day.

Display strategy: In 2013, public accounts were still in the pink period, so they were mainly displayed on public accounts; secondly, they recommended high-quality content and popular content within the APP.

3) Initial content preparation

Content padding

In the early days of Xiaohongshu's launch, as a content product, high-quality content was the key to attracting traffic to the platform. In order to efficiently acquire seed users, it was also necessary to improve and optimize the platform's content.

Therefore, in the early stage of the product, Xiaohongshu mainly relied on editors and official original works, focusing on topics and using relevant keywords to select topics. A certain amount of tasks is assigned to the editor every day to fill in and reserve content.

For example, Xiaohongshu pushed an article titled "The Most Comprehensive Shopping Guide to European Outlets in History", but it also reserved 9 articles for related topics derived from the relevant keywords of this article.

It can be seen that Xiaohongshu attached great importance to the quantity reserves of content in the early days.

Control content quality

Although Xiaohongshu's early content was mainly PGC, followed by the community's UGC. In order to efficiently acquire seed users, control the quality of UGC, and motivate users to perform UGC operations, Xiaohongshu added the function of user level and points system in version 1.5 in February 2014.

In addition, Xiaohongshu presents and ranks content based on users' comments, likes, favorites, and follows. The quality management is the responsibility of the users. Although management deviations may occur if the content is entirely based on user preferences, it still plays a certain role in controlling content quality.

Catch seed users

Xiaohongshu was launched not long ago, and the year-end consumption peak in November and December is about to arrive. If you want to efficiently obtain seed users, you must catch up with this shopping peak.

At that time, Xiaohongshu used free WeChat official accounts as its primary platform for promotion and traffic diversion. Also, in 2013, official accounts were still in the period of gaining fans. Therefore, Xiaohongshu spent 9 months focusing on building its official account, producing high-quality content, and pushing various shopping guide-related content. The steady growth of the official account's fans led to a steady increase in Xiaohongshu's users . At the same time, the high-quality content allowed Xiaohongshu to form a word-of-mouth marketing effect on social media.

3.2 Content Perspective

(1) Content collection and creation

Creation of seed users

In the early days of Xiaohongse, a large number of high-quality PGCs were used to divert initial users. After the initial users were diverted to the product, the seed users could be easily classified from the initial users through the existing user growth system.

This group of seed users is the key to the formation of Xiaohongshu's UGC community. Since Xiaohongshu's initial users are female users who go to Hong Kong for shopping, a large number of buyers will be attracted by the content and become Xiaohongshu users, and may develop into seed users. This group of seed users are buyers, so after shopping, they share their shopping experience and product usage experience in the community, thereby continuously providing valuable and high-quality content for the Xiaohongshu UGC community.

Invite experts to share

In the early days, Xiaohongshu would assign some tasks to content editors to invite influencers. The purpose was to invite shopping experts to share on the platform and give users an experience that exceeded their expectations.

Planning topic content

The platform uses professional PGC content to plan topic content, attract a large number of initial users, and screen out seed users for cultivation and retention.

(2) Content presentation and management

Content presentation

In the early days, Xiaohongshu’s homepage used feed streams to present recommended information, meeting the needs of continuously updating and presenting content to users. Secondly, the content presentation is mainly in the form of pictures + texts, supplemented by video content presentation.

Content push and recommendation mechanism

Content recommendation form: homepage feed flow

Content recommendation mechanism: user weight + user behavior (likes, favorites, comments, etc., analyze user preferences for recommendations, and recommendations based on machine algorithms); in addition, Xiaohongshu provides users with content categories, allowing them to choose a few that they are interested in. Xiaohongshu will then use machine algorithms based on user choices to recommend content that users are interested in.

Content push form: mainly message center and red dot reminder

Content push mechanism: push content, frequency, and time based on user behavior to determine push contact time

Content push channels: WeChat public account, APP system push

Content Standards

In the early days, Xiaohongshu classified and planned its product content, and would reprocess high-quality content, adding keyword tags to high-quality content to allow users to quickly get to the point of the content, while optimizing the product content search engine.

(3) Diffusion and transmission of content

WeChat Official Account

In 2013, Xiaohongshu used WeChat official accounts, a free promotion channel that was still in the period of gaining fans, as its first front for promotion and diversion. By creating professional, high-quality and practical content, Xiaohongshu formed user reputation and natural dissemination, and accumulated tens of millions of users.

Weibo

Weibo served as another channel for Xiaohongshu’s daily promotion in its early stages. The topics pushed on Weibo on a daily basis come from high-quality content produced by users on the platform, and word-of-mouth is established and seed users are introduced through content. However, the official account is still the first front for promotion and traffic diversion.

(4) Content effectiveness and evaluation

The evaluation of content effectiveness varies depending on the platform of the promotion channel.

Weibo: Evaluate the effectiveness of pushed content through the number of reposts, readings, and likes.

Official Accounts: Evaluate the effectiveness of pushed content through the number of reads and reposts.

APP: Evaluate the effectiveness of pushed content through the number of collections, likes, and shares.

If the content pushed by a certain channel is effective and has a great response, Xiaohongshu will split the topic keywords to create other related content.

IV. Conclusion

In the early days of Xiaohongshu, without any advertising, it used "Hong Kong" as its content positioning and only served female users who planned to go shopping in Hong Kong . Through high-quality content, it formed social media word-of-mouth marketing, established a good user reputation for products in the exploratory stage, and promoted the natural spread of the brand, laying the foundation for Xiaohongshu to become a community with tens of millions of monthly active users today.

Author: Network

Source: Jianshu