Advanced ways to operate and promote Xiaohongshu!

When we mention Xiaohongshu, we may think of recommendations and recommendations. It feels like a friend has discovered something good and shared it with me. This community atmosphere of recommendations from acquaintances makes Xiaohongshu the most worthy place for word-of-mouth and promotion. Because consumers may not believe in business advertisements, but they are more willing to believe in recommendations from acquaintances.

Moreover, the majority of users of Xiaohongshu are those born after 1990, 86% of whom are women. Consumers have a strong desire to buy, and when they see good products shared with them, they are very likely to buy them.

Recently a friend asked me whether I should promote on Xiaohongshu? Generally speaking, merchants fall into two categories:

The first type: Companies that need to build a brand: use Xiaohongshu to gain exposure and create real word-of-mouth among product users.

The second type: companies that have opened stores on Tmall, JD.com, and Vipshop: Because Xiaohongshu currently focuses on promoting products, although it can bring some sales, the core point is not here, but in promoting products and achieving better conversions on other platforms through promoting products. The core reason why people are willing to pay for promotion on Xiaohongshu is that compared with Taobao Through Train, the promotion cost is lower and it is easier to generate ROI. In addition, brand words, product keywords and grass-planting content will be on Xiaohongshu and even included in Baidu, and retained for a long time, thereby improving the product's sales conversion rate.

Although Xiaohongshu is recognized by the industry as the most effective community promotion platform at this stage, its professional popularity is not high, and it is not easy to do well in Xiaohongshu. Next, I will explain to you the three core contents of Xiaohongshu's screen-dominating marketing, help you learn the refined operation of content marketing, and realize the true integration of brand and effect as soon as possible.

Little Red Book Rules

First, let’s interpret the rules of Xiaohongshu

Many friends have encountered these problems: being blocked by Xiaohongshu as soon as they started promoting, being prompted for violations as soon as they posted a note, or not being included after posting, being restricted from posting, etc. In fact, these are all caused by people not understanding the content rules.

The Xiaohongshu community rules can be summarized into three major rules:

1. Fairness Mechanism

2. Monitoring Mechanism

3. Detection mechanism

Fair mechanism: Because there are too many notes produced on Xiaohongshu now, 5-6 notes on the same topic may be generated in one second. In order to avoid the ranking of notes fluctuating too quickly, Xiaohongshu has set up delayed ranking updates. This is why it takes ten days or half a month for the notes we put out to see the top effect.

The monitoring mechanism means that after the notes are posted, it will monitor the authenticity of the sources of likes, comments, and collections, as well as whether your article is original or copied from others. As long as there is a problem in any of these dimensions, the platform will not recommend it.

The detection mechanism refers to whether the article contains any violations such as guidance, inducement, and marketing. If the number of violations reaches a certain level, Xiaohongshu will comprehensively restrict the exposure of content related to the brand, and in serious cases, the account will be blocked.

I have roughly listed the areas where businesses are prone to violations when promoting:

1. The promotion notes were written as hard advertisements for businesses. Some friends asked me why I was still judged as violating regulations even though I wrote soft articles. In fact, it is difficult for people who have no experience in content operation to tell whether an article is soft or not. This degree needs to be controlled by professionals.

2. The promotional content contains sensitive words, for example, directly sending WeChat accounts, repurchase, purchase, ordering, price, how much, Taobao, Tmall, JD.com, Suning.com, bought, APP, other AAP matches and other sensitive words involving purchase and traffic, and telephone calls are not allowed to involve, making money, part-time jobs, various price cuts, event benefits, discounts and other misleading words.

Marketing terms such as "strongly recommend", "Amway", and "buy now" will also be restricted.

3. You cannot use lucky draws and welfare activities to induce attention/likes/collections/comments~

4. It cannot contain misleading information, such as making appointments at physical stores, directing customers to make purchases on Tmall or JD.com, etc. Whether users go there is a personal choice, and your content cannot guide them there.

5. Avoid including product names and brand names in the title.

Notes will only be recommended to users after they have been detected to have no problems.

So what is Xiaohongshu’s recommendation mechanism? Let me explain it to you.

The notes will first enter the public domain, and the platform will expose them according to the user's preferences. For example, people who like beauty will see notes about cosmetics, people who like food will see notes about food, and people who like travel will see notes about travel. If the account you choose is of high quality, then the notes will be recommended first and will have greater exposure.

When a note has a high click-through rate within a certain period of time, Xiaohongshu will recommend it to more people, and the note will be more likely to be pinned to the top.

Someone asked me, if I rely on interactive click-through rate to get to the top, can I buy data? In fact, Xiaohongshu will also look at the time the user stays on your note. In other words, the longer the user looks at it, the more valuable it judges your note to be. The data you buy is usually generated by machines, which is of no help and prone to violations.

How to sell goods on Xiaohongshu?

Next, let’s talk about how to sell goods on Xiaohongshu?

Before I start, let me first explain a few cases to you. The first one is Perfect Diary.

Friends who follow e-commerce beauty may know more about this. This brand was founded in 2016. In just over two years, by 2019, Perfect Diary ranked seventh in monthly sales of beauty products on Tmall, followed by top international brands such as Givenchy, Dior, and others. During the Double 11 shopping festival in 2018, Perfect Diary achieved a sales volume of over 100 million yuan in just 1 hour and 28 minutes after the opening. In many promotional activities, Perfect Diary also ranked first in the industry in terms of sales.

Why was a new brand like Perfect Diary able to make a comeback and break through in such a short period of time? In fact, it was thanks to Xiaohongshu. Since the end of 2017, Perfect Diary has invested in celebrities, top KOLs, mid-level KOLs, bottom KOLs and ordinary people. The brand's planting notes dominated Xiaohongshu, and the secondary dissemination brought about by word-of-mouth and influence led to fission.

So far, searching Perfect Diary has a total of more than 100,000 notes.

Unlike Xiaohongshu and WeChat official accounts, you won’t find two identical notes. Perfect Diary collaborates with Xiaohongshu bloggers to have bloggers write and publish notes. Users have high trust in the content and are more likely to believe and buy. Furthermore, users who have purchased the content will spontaneously share and publish notes on Xiaohongshu if they think the content is good, leading to secondary dissemination.

If you have a budget of several million for an advertisement like Perfect Diary, you can run it on a large scale and on a wide range like it does. However, for some businesses that have limited budgets but want to achieve results, refined content delivery is the most ideal choice.

The second example is a BIMIX beauty instrument project that we did ourselves.

The brand of the beauty instrument is a new brand that was transformed from a traditional factory. At the beginning, they just invested tens of thousands of dollars with the mentality of giving it a try. Unexpectedly, after the launch, 30% of the notes were pinned to the top. When searching for "eye radio frequency device", the first few notes were ours. Moreover, when searching for eye radio frequency on Taobao, the brand-related term "bimix eye radio frequency" began to appear in the drop-down recommendations.

Now, the tens of thousands of yuan invested have long been paid back. Moreover, after investing in the notes, many users now spontaneously post notes about the bimix eye radiofrequency device. A search on Baidu will show that there are quite a few notes on Bemix’s Little Red Book, which has brought good exposure and traffic to the brand.

In fact, if you have studied our delivery methods, you will find that our refined delivery is similar to that of big brands, but why can't merchants themselves and most MCN agencies do it? Because most people don’t understand the three core aspects of community delivery:

Community delivery

Three core elements of community delivery: KOL, content, and rhythm

First is KOL

Many people think that to make notes about promoting a product, all you have to do is find some celebrities and ask them to write notes and publish them. In fact, this is not the case. Let’s be clear: quantity of bloggers does not equal quality. If you just randomly find some bloggers to post, it will not be effective, and it is easy to be blacklisted by Xiaohongshu because of the poor quality of the note content.

So we will first do a KOL screening:

1. To look at the interactive data, you can first judge and filter from the likes data of each picture and text on the homepage. Under normal circumstances, the bloggers have different topics, content and release times, so the data will be good and bad, and fluctuations are normal. But if you open a blogger's homepage, some have hundreds or thousands of likes, while some have only dozens. You can judge that the quality of this blogger's creations is unstable. If you choose such a blogger, he may write a popular article for you, or no one may be interested in the notes he writes.

At the same time, if the number of likes, collections and comments on commercially reported articles is much higher than that of other notes, it means that data maintenance has been done and the data is inflated. In addition, if you see that an article has hundreds of likes and collections, but only one or two comments or even no comments, you can also conclude that the data is fake.

2. Look at the comment area . The comment area can reflect the activity and stickiness of each influencer's fans. Many people think that the more comments, the better. In fact, the comments made by real people and machines are surprisingly consistent, with a large number of "Where to buy, how does it taste, it's very easy to use, I'm really interested and I'm going to place an order right away."

Another situation is that influencers form groups with each other. When you click on the accounts that comment in the message sections of several notes, you will find that the first seven or eight are KOLs. It is also common for everyone to post comments on each other.

In addition, we will also look at the consistency of user comments and notes. For example, in store exploration notes, most of the comments are praising the blogger's lipstick, clothes and shoes, and they don't care about the store at all, so it is useless to place an advertisement.

3. See if the blogger has posted similar products before. For example, if the product you are investing in this time is a beauty device, then choose an account that has written about beauty devices before, and Xiaohongshu will also support more traffic accordingly.

In addition, it also depends on whether the blogger’s attributes are consistent with the product’s attributes. For example, if you ask a beauty blogger to endorse some maternal and infant products, the effect is definitely difficult to guarantee.

4. With the help of the brand partner platform, you can use the official account to log in and view the data of celebrities who are qualified as brand partners. Normally, the ratio of exposure and reading of the influencer's non-commercial notes is about 10:1, that is, 10 people are exposed to 1 person who reads it. If the exposure is high and the reading is low, it means that the influencer's ability to produce high-quality notes is very low.

However, this platform can only see the data of brand partners. Xiaohongshu currently has very few partners and they are expensive, so most non-partner bloggers cannot see it. It just so happens that these bloggers are the ones we must choose for our advertising, so how do we judge it?

Most people think that they can be selected as long as the previous data is fine, but a better way to ensure quality is to use professional tools and have professionals judge the blogger's creative ability, including copywriting expression ability, selling point communication ability, advertising and marketing strength, image shooting and processing ability, and other aspects.

This judgment requires professionals to have professional copywriting skills, strong content creation capabilities, and rich work experience. These are also beyond the reach of tools.

Because I have been working in e-commerce for twelve years and have been engaged in brand planning, I have served hundreds of domestic and foreign brands, large and small. The new media team I have trained is highly professional in content, so I have an advantage in this aspect, which is also something that many MCN agencies and brands that work on Xiaohongshu cannot do on their own.

Before screening KOLs, we will make KOL layout in advance. According to the brand's budget, we will reasonably allocate the number of top KOLs with more than 100,000 fans, the number of middle KOLs with 50,000-100,000 fans, the number of tail KOLs with 10,000-50,000 fans, and the number of amateurs with 1,000-10,000 fans. They are usually arranged in a pyramid, for example 10 at the head, 30 in the middle, 60 at the tail, and around 100 amateurs.

I have also encountered this. A friend gave me a list of KOLs he selected for analysis. When I looked at it, I found that most of them were low-end KOLs with 10,000 to 20,000 fans, and amateurs with less than 5,000 fans. Although this solution is low-cost, the effect is not that good. If you don’t believe it, you can go for a comprehensive screening.

Content Core

Having said KOL, let me talk about content

There are several main parts: keyword layout, direction planning, note requirements, and selling point writing. These aspects must be reflected in the writing requirements given to bloggers.

The first part is keyword layout. After determining the product to be launched, we need to select the most frequently used words when users search for this product, and at the same time make the selection based on the keyword notes included in Xiaohongshu. For example, for the Bemis eye beauty device we make, the most searched term by users is eye massage, but when searching for eye massage on Xiaohongshu, there are 150,000 notes. If we use this as our core keyword, it will be difficult to get it to the top. Other keywords, such as eye beauty devices, include 30,000 notes. According to the brand's budget, the top rate is not high, but there is hope.

So in the end we took eye beauty device as the main keyword, and Bemis eye radio frequency device, eye bags, eye wrinkles, and eye circles as auxiliary keywords. Finally, we pinned 2 articles on eye beauty devices and 5 articles on eye radio frequency devices in the top ten. Up to now, even though eye beauty devices have not continued to maintain their popularity and have been pushed down by new notes, there are still several top posts for precise small words such as eye radio frequency devices (which often have high conversion rates). Precise small words often have higher conversion rates.

The second part is the planning of the note direction. Many brands will ignore this point when making advertising, but this is often the most important, because once the direction is determined, all the note effects can be combined to drive growth. Let me give you an example of direction. For example, an eye cream mainly improves eye problems and fights aging. Then I will divide it into several directions according to user classification and blogger classification. For young girls in their 20s, this is an eye cream for staying up late, which can make you still look like a little fairy after staying up all night. For bloggers over 30 years old, this is an anti-aging and anti-aging eye cream. Different products will have different writing directions, and it is not enough to just give keywords and list selling points.

The third part of the notes requires that when many people list requirements for bloggers, they will ask for a certain number of selling points, and even how many lines a keyword should appear. In fact, this will limit the blogger's creativity, and the content of the notes will be monotonous. If you encounter an uncooperative blogger, you will tell the user that this is what the advertising dad told me to write. Therefore, we clearly tell bloggers that they cannot plagiarize selling points, the title must contain keywords, the content must be based on their own lives, and it must be soft enough to include useful information and soft implantation. For some products that are difficult to shoot, we will also provide shooting suggestions, and even directly provide pictures that we have taken specifically for Xiaohongshu notes. A picture will only be used once.

The fourth part is how to write the selling points. This is also very important. Many people will directly organize the product features and send them to the blogger. In fact, this is wrong. You must clearly explain the principles of this feature and the benefits it brings to consumers, and write it in the most understandable terms. Like us, we are professionals in charge of sales copywriting. We give the written selling points to bloggers. After the sorted selling points, bloggers can easily get the benefits to consumers. After processing, they will form very attractive notes.

The fifth part is review and optimization: How to review and optimize has become a difficult problem faced by many friends. I have seen a KOL complain that the reviewer was like a Chinese teacher, picking out her grammar word by word. In fact, this not only has no effect, but can also easily cause KOLs to be disgusted. Xiaohongshu notes are not like writing essays, but more like chatting with friends, with a more natural and casual style. Therefore, the review is generally in these areas:

1. Whether you are writing according to the writing requirements, whether you are deviating from the direction, etc.

2. Article logic. Generally speaking, as long as the KOL is selected well, there is no need to worry about this, as the blogger has basic business capabilities.

3. Whether the selling points are written correctly does not depend on whether they are written in full, but whether the core selling points are written and whether they are written correctly.

4. Are the first picture and title attractive? Is the title beautiful enough?

5. Topic selection: give the blogger a topic of his or her choice.

Generally speaking, if the notes still do not meet the requirements after two revisions, it is recommended that you take them and revise them yourself. This requires that the review and optimization personnel need to have professional content literacy and their abilities must be much stronger than those of KOLs. In this case, after we make the changes, some amateur notes can also achieve the effect of KOL.

Delivery rhythm

Now that I have discussed the content, let me talk about the delivery rhythm.

Before launching a product, it is best to launch it in conjunction with the launch of new products, because when new products are launched, Xiaohongshu will match them with waterfall flow recommendations. In this way, after customers are attracted and see the products frequently, it will be easy for them to place orders.

The length of the delivery cycle and the number of articles to be published at a time should be determined in a rhythmic manner and not chaotic, so as to attract traffic in a long-term and stable manner. I have seen some people submit twenty articles in one day, while others do not take notes at all during the entire submission process. This not only has poor effects, but it is also easy to violate regulations if too much is placed at one time.

In addition, when placing an advertisement, you also need to consider the ranking of the KOLs. If you have configured celebrity KOL, top KOL, middle KOL, tail KOL and amateurs. Generally speaking, the content is released first to attract attention, then the top, middle and tail KOLs try it out, and then ordinary people give it a good review.

A lot has been said about how to achieve the effect of selling products through promoting products on Xiaohongshu, and I believe everyone has gained something from it now. However, achieving sales goals can only be regarded as a small goal of Xiaohongshu. As a brand, we need to pay more attention to how our merchants can make their investments bring results far beyond expectations. Let me tell you about it next.

Advanced gameplay to achieve 100,000 results with 10,000 investment

Advanced gameplay 1: brand drop-down words

Many people may not know what drop-down words are. For example, when a user searches for "breast massager", "beauty trap breast massager" appears in the optional keywords below the search box. In this way, the user sees you at first sight before seeing the information of other competitors, which can help the brand to efficiently attract traffic and conversion.

If you want to achieve brand drop-down words, the key is to see how many people search for this word. There are three core points: one is the note content, the second is the brand keyword layout, and the third is the number of notes.

How do you understand the content of the first note? In fact, it depends on the quality of the notes you put out. If the notes are of good quality and have a strong ability to attract users, there will be many users who want to buy and search for them a lot, and it will be easy for drop-down words to appear. As I mentioned before, the quality of notes requires professional content planning and control.

The second point is brand keywords. In the requirements given to bloggers for their creations, you must give the core keywords of the brand. For example, if the drop-down word I want to make is "Beauty Plan Breast Massager", the blogger's notes cannot be written as "Beauty Plan Breast Massager", or "Beauty Plan Beautiful Breast Treasure", or separate the words.

The third point is the number of notes. The more high-quality notes you contribute, the more people will search for them. Everyone should understand this. Generally speaking, if you want to have brand drop-down words, it is safer to have at least 50 notes, with the top, middle, and tail KOLs and amateurs distributed in proportion.

Advanced gameplay 2: Keyword pinning

What is keyword pinning? In fact, when a user searches for a certain keyword, your brand-related notes appear in the top ten. Pinned notes not only have good exposure, but also can obtain long-term and continuous traffic.

Currently, most of the pinning methods are done through manual maintenance, which requires maintenance, usually for one month. If not maintained, it will be removed. The charge for a note is 3,000-5,000, not including the blogger's royalties. We do this by naturally pinning the post, which means that after the blogger posts it, we don’t do any maintenance. We create good content so that users will like to read it, and the official will recognize the high-quality notes and pin them to the top. This kind of note is very effective. The Bemis Eye Radiofrequency Device that we invested in a few months ago is still ranked first and there is no additional charge.

In summary, the core of keyword pinning is three points: the number of notes, the choice of keywords, and the quality of content.

The first point is the number of notes: this is easy to understand. The larger the base number, the higher the probability of the note being pinned to the top. The specific number needs to be determined based on the brand situation and delivery plan.

The second point is keyword selection: the selected keywords should not only be those that are frequently searched by target users but also those that have few competitors. If the budget is sufficient and the number of notes is large, you can also strive for more than 50,000 keywords. The specific steps are mentioned in the keyword layout in the above content.

The third point is the quality of the content, which is the most important. The fundamental reason for pinning lies in the quality of the notes. Only by controlling the quality of all notes can the probability of keyword pinning be increased.

Advanced gameplay three: KOL quality upgrade method

This method of play refers to allowing an amateur with 1,000-5,000 fans to achieve the effect of a small KOL, and a small KOL with 10,000-50,000 fans to achieve the effect of a mid-level KOL or even a top KOL. The key is to improve the quality of your notes. First of all, screening out high-quality KOLs is a basic requirement. These KOLs themselves have certain creative abilities, and there will generally be no problems with the content. What we need to do is to optimize the notes before publishing, focusing on pictures and some details.

The first picture must be beautiful and unique. Generally speaking, if we are not satisfied with the picture provided by the blogger, we will give specific suggestions for reshooting, such as holding the picture handheld and giving demonstration angles. If the photo is acceptable, but after evaluation we think there is much room for improvement in terms of beauty and attractiveness, we will even have professionals to guide or perform the optimization ourselves.

The title needs to be attractive and contain keywords. Most bloggers do not have the ability to produce hits, and it is difficult for them to control the deep logic and high-end techniques of the copy. Experienced masters of hit copywriting will be responsible for optimization at this level.

Other details, such as selecting topics and emojis based on Xiaohongshu data, also need attention.

It takes time to make Xiaohongshu a success. We have accumulated experience over a long period of time and gathered outstanding talents to do this well. Here I would like to thank some of my good friends who first gave me the opportunity for our team to test the waters, and now I am more confident to help more business friends do well on Xiaohongshu.

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Author: Bobo

Source: Bobo's Kitchen