3 misunderstandings and solutions in operating Xiaohongshu!

As content marketing explodes, Xiaohongshu becomes a battleground for companies to seize market share

As more and more players enter the market, the gap between brand effects is getting bigger and bigger. The gap may be hidden in today's tweets. Today, I will give you three common misunderstandings about Xiaohongshu to help you avoid pitfalls.

Myth 1: Xiaohongshu ≠ another traffic pool

I used to often say in public live broadcasts that please don’t treat Xiaohongshu as your traffic pool, but as a life guide for your users. Only those who benefit “her” will win.

Xiaohongshu is all about tone. On Xiaohongshu, you have to speak on tiptoe and talk about emotional value. The higher the tone, the more users love it. The more you focus on cost-effectiveness and traditional selling points, the more likely you are to be eliminated by Xiaohongshu.

Other brands are saying: I am not selling products, I am advocating a new lifestyle

And your brand is still saying: I am having a promotion recently, buy one get one free, durable and affordable

Two dimensions cannot fight against three dimensions, and a higher dimension attack is fatal

In today's business environment in China, 99.9% of fast-moving consumer goods categories have no category barriers. The products you can make today can also be made by others tomorrow. I always believe that half of the credit for the success of today's new generation of brands should be attributed to the success of China's supply chain . Today’s brands don’t even need to have their own production chain. New products can be launched in as little as three days. The selling points you talk about everywhere can be copied by other competing products at any time.

In this era, there is no such thing as "good wine needs no bush". You have to take the initiative, you have to find differentiation, you have to talk about lifestyle. Most products do not have social attributes, but lifestyles do. This is a very important point in word-of-mouth communication, especially for women. A refined life is much better than a life built on cost-effectiveness. After all, women in this era earn as much as men and they can afford to spend.

Every traffic operator must establish a correct operating concept before entering a certain platform. The operating concept can change due to the change of the platform. Please do not use the operating concept of Douyin and Weibo to operate Xiaohongshu, otherwise you will lose miserably.

Misconception 2: Build up the volume first before starting Xiaohongshu

The first thing most brands do when entering Xiaohongshu is to increase their sales.

People usually think that the node that links Xiaohongshu users is Xiaohongshu influencers, but in fact, it is the content that links users, and influencers are just carriers of different content types. Although the number of influencers’ existing fans can determine the basic distribution number (about 200 for 1,000 fans and about 500 for 10,000 fans), the upper limit of content distribution is determined only by the content.

Content = unlimited growth of traffic entrance . Each content is the smallest marketing unit. It is more important to improve the quality of content than to increase the quantity. The cost-effectiveness of quality must be greater than that of quantity.

Some people may say that it is cheap to publish hundreds or thousands of articles with just tens of thousands of dollars, which seems to be very cost-effective. However, there is a very high risk of "damaging" brand words and keywords.

A few days ago, a brand member in the cotton towel category asked for help, hoping that I could help analyze why the natural traffic and inclusion of Xiaohongshu have been poor, so I captured some key data and generated a visual table, as shown below

This brand only started to advertise on Xiaohongshu in March. Before that, the brand had no presence on Xiaohongshu. It can be seen from the visualization table that the number of related notes was always 0 before March, so the brand chose to directly expand the market and made 200 test articles in the first month. The traffic was OK at the beginning, but the organic traffic continued to decline and the inclusion rate also hit a new low. The overall inclusion rate was lowered to 42% in March. Although the brand continued to expand in April and May, the number of expansions was controlled due to the continuous decline in the inclusion rate.

I believe that many small and medium-sized brands have also encountered this situation. The best way to avoid it is to slow down the pace of delivery. For the community, a brand may not have any influence at first, but suddenly at a certain stage, the number of related notes increases sharply. This behavior will be judged by the community as malicious marketing behavior and a "politically incorrect" violation of the community convention. When such content exceeds a certain warning line, it may cause brand words and related keywords to be restricted or even blocked. In this case, no matter how many notes are posted, no recommended traffic will be obtained, resulting in a significant reduction in the effect of the posting.

Therefore, before launching an ad on Xiaohongshu, please first collect information about whether your brand currently has "natural volume" on the Xiaohongshu site. If you already have a certain amount of "natural volume" foundation, you can choose to cooperate with a small number of high-quality KOCs to keep the volume growing naturally. If you do not have "natural volume" on the site, it is recommended to start with mid-level KOLs, and then gradually increase the number of KOCs. It should be a gradual process. Try not to make the number of related notes and likes too high in the first month. It is usually not recommended to directly increase the volume in the first month.

The delivery model I usually use is as shown in the figure below. I start with mid-level KOLs, and report them if possible to drive the growth of natural traffic. After the first wave of natural traffic is exhausted, I use KOCs to supplement it to maintain the growth curve. After the traffic is stable, I use Xiaohongshu brand official V, e-commerce or private domain channels to stimulate self-propagation, and finally use top KOLs to break through the traffic bottleneck.

Misunderstanding 3: You must pursue a high inclusion rate

Why is it included?

Xiaohongshu notes are included , that is, notes that meet the following two points at the same time. 1. Notes captured by the Xiaohongshu system and not deleted by the system or influencers; 2. Notes with corresponding tags and hot search terms (if these two conditions are met, the system will distribute recommended traffic and search traffic)

After reading the definition, do you think inclusion is important? In our past experience, there were indeed brand customers who asked us to guarantee a certain inclusion rate. It seemed that everyone attached great importance to the inclusion of Xiaohongshu, and felt that if the notes they put in were not included, it would be a waste of money.

But in fact, inclusion is just a rumor, and Xiaohongshu has never mentioned or explained the inclusion.

Inclusion is actually a false proposition. In order to verify the impact of inclusion on search terms, several colleagues and I conducted an on-site experiment.

Assuming that none of us have searched for Estee Lauder on Xiaohongshu, we searched for Estee Lauder separately, and the pages that appeared were almost different.

The matching between search results and needs is mainly the matching degree between core keywords and queries. The specific content displayed in the search results is to find the information that best meets user needs by analyzing user needs.

This also proves that Xiaohongshu’s keyword search results are actually different for different people, rather than in a fixed order.

Therefore, there is no such thing as 100% inclusion, and there is no need to pursue inclusion. Instead, we should focus on the match between the content and the target audience.

Author: Zhao Zichen Vic

Source: Zhao Zichen Vic (yunyingfxb)