Xiaohongshu KOL promotion: the secret of note ranking and weight algorithm!

Two months have passed since Xiaohongshu’s big purge, but for many KOLs and companies, the impact of the big purge is far from over. However, neither companies nor KOLs can continue to wait for the platform to “change its mind”. Only by slowly adapting to the new rules of the platform can they become gold diggers in the new environment.

In this case, the needs of enterprises and KOL that still need to monetize on Xiaohongshu are becoming increasingly clear: note ranking;

From a certain perspective, note ranking represents the strongest promotional effect that a note can achieve.

What is Note Ranking?

Why does note ranking have such a great influence? Here I must tell you a story. Let us go back in time to Baidu in the early days of China's Internet.

Relying on its excellent search engine technology, Baidu has undoubtedly become the real entrance to China's Internet. Baidu is like a distribution machine, distributing each person according to different search results. For example, if you search for Sina, you will be shown Sina, Sina Weibo and everything related to Sina. In the entire massive amount of Internet information, the indexing and organization of content becomes very important. Because of this, Baidu has become the first stop on the Internet. Then, as we all know, the content of the word you searched for will be displayed. This undoubtedly brings huge business opportunities. For example, if you search for Tesla, it is almost obvious that you are a potential customer of Tesla. If you add an advertisement for other cars of the same level in front of Tesla's content, you will be attracted. It is precisely because of the precise placement of advertisements that it undoubtedly saves a huge amount of advertising costs compared to various wide-ranging advertisements.

The greater the traffic on the Baidu platform itself, the greater the impact it will have, and it can even change your daily lifestyle, for example, it can influence your choice of hospital for medical treatment.

In addition to companies like Baidu, of course many people and small companies have also seen this huge business opportunity. Is it possible to rank in the top few positions for a certain keyword without spending any money through some means? Such precise delivery and saving of advertising fees paid to Baidu are undoubtedly a more profitable operation, which has spawned a profession called: SEO. The full name of SEO is search engine optimization. Simply put, it is to improve or optimize your website structure or web page content in a free way to increase the index ranking of web pages under a certain keyword. After the Internet era, traffic was gradually divided by various platforms. In the era of mobile Internet, Baidu is no longer the entrance to traffic, and the software mall for downloading apps has become the first stop for mobile Internet. Therefore, this has spawned the profession of App store ranking optimization: ASO, but the logic is still the same;

What we are going to talk about today is how to rank the notes on Xiaohongshu. In fact, the logic is essentially the same as the "SEO" and "ASO" mentioned above. Both of them achieve the goal of ranking high by exploring the rules of the platform and making them as consistent as possible.

Of course, some partners who operate Xiaohongshu said to me, isn’t Xiaohongshu different for each person? Isn’t note exposure based on recommendations? Why do we still need to rank notes?

I have to parse this here:

1. It is true that Xiaohongshu has different faces for different people, but this is only the case on the recommendation page and the follow page, and the exposure is based on the notes. If the system determines that the weight is low, it will not continue to recommend, and it may not even meet the basic demand of exposure to all your fans;

2. Through the analysis of some KOLs’ fans, we found that more than 50% of the conversion rate (clicks/follows/collections) of Xiaohongshu’s fans come from Xiaohongshu searches; so at least half of the traffic cannot be ignored by anyone, and you cannot guarantee that you will get the 50% natural traffic, which shows that search traffic is more important.

And what information are these notes ranked based on?

This is because there is a thing called "weight". Increasing the weight means improving the ranking of notes. This is exactly why I wrote this article. After reading this article, you will be able to solve your question: What is the weight algorithm of Xiaohongshu?

Xiaohongshu Weight Rules

Of course, when we do a detailed analysis, we must know that if your account is banned, blacklisted, or in violation of regulations, or if your notes are blocked for commercial content, this set of weighting rules will no longer apply.

So our content today is mainly to analyze how to make the content good, and I have already talked about the violations in detail in the previous article "The Secret of Note Limitation". If you have any questions, you can review the previous article. I will not discuss it in this article. Let’s look at today’s dry goods, Xiaohongshu’s weight rules.

1

Account Weight Rule Algorithm

When we analyze the rules of weights, we still have to follow the order from large to small. Only in this way can we draw conclusions. What will happen if we don’t analyze it this way? Then I will check all the details for one article, and finally find out that it is an account problem. This order of checking will waste a lot of time and energy, so I always emphasize that you must analyze from big to small;

The weight of a Xiaohongshu account is controlled by seven main key points, namely: originality rate, verticality rate, content quality rate, account activity rate, account level, whether it is a brand partner, and whether it has signed a contract with MCN. What are the uses of these key weights? It will determine the number of exposures your new note gets when it is first sent out. I will explain in detail what each key point means and how to optimize it;

1. Originality rate:

I must emphasize again that Xiaohongshu is a typical life sharing and grass-growing community. What is the core of the community? Of course it’s the content and atmosphere. If it’s all copy-and-pasted content, who would still watch it? If copied and pasted content can also gain a lot of exposure, then the original content creators will suffer great unfairness, and the entire community will become a place where bad money drives out good money, and the entire community will collapse. Therefore, originality is the focus of Xiaohongshu's crackdown! No matter how good the content of your notes is, it must be original! Now let's talk about what originality rate is. Most of our notes are of course composed of Chinese characters. Even if they are truly original, some of the content may be the same. So in this case, Xiaohongshu will combine the originality of each of your notes to get an average value. The parameter of this average value is the originality rate.

In this case, how can we improve the originality rate?

The simplest way is of course to make all content original, including pictures, but as mentioned earlier, even if it is original, there may be some overlap in content. What should we do about this?

Here is a little trick, because the system identifies originality based on the proportion of content. Everyone has written a paper after graduating from college, and it’s a similar situation. So as long as your content is a little longer, the proportion of the parts that are easy to overlap will be reduced. In this way, the originality rate of the entire account will increase.

2. Vertical rate

What does vertical mean? To put it simply, it means focusing on a certain field. For example, in Xiaohongshu, if you are a fashion blogger and only post notes about fashion content, even if the content is vertical, if you post about fashion today, food tomorrow, and beauty the day after tomorrow, the system will not be able to figure out your positioning. It can only judge your positioning based on your most notes or the most similar tags. However, your content is varied. Among your 10 notes, there are 3 about food, 3 about beauty, and 4 about fashion. Although the system thinks you are a fashion blogger, because there are too many categories of notes, your vertical rate is reduced. For example, in the case just now, your verticality is 2/5. If you can increase the proportion of content in the vertical field, the weight of the vertical rate will also increase.

(An example of an account with high vertical content)

3. Content quality rate

Although content quality is determined by the content of the notes, it still has an important impact on the weight of the account. The literal meaning of content quality is actually very easy to understand, which is the quality of your previous notes. So how do you judge whether it is good or not? It is the ratio of the exposure of the note to the benefits gained from the previous note, that is, comments and likes, etc. The average content quality coefficient of all the notes in this account is the content quality rate of your account.

4. Account activity rate

The account activity rate is the basic quality for judging an account, but because it can only judge a person's loyalty, the weight of this account activity rate is relatively general. I call it "hard work points". What does it mean? It means that even if there is no credit, there is still hard work, so give some weight to show your appreciation... However, this account activity rate cannot be ignored. Although active accounts can basically get it, it also depends on whether you can get a better account activity weight. So how do you calculate the account activity specifically?

1) Note publishing

2) Like, comment, and favorite

3) Login and browse

The size of the weights are arranged in this order. If you only complete one of them, you can get part of the weighted points. If you do all of them, of course you will get the highest score. But some students are also very smart. These are things that can be operated all the time. Can I like, comment, collect, etc. infinitely? Can I manually increase the account activity rate and make this part of the weight go off the charts? I don’t need other weights, and my weight can still exceed others!

This idea is of course seriously wrong, because each weight has its own upper limit. For example, for note publishing, I think publishing three articles a week is a very appropriate frequency . You can get the note publishing weight points. It is meaningless to publish more. Moreover, your content may not be able to reach the level of one article every two days. After all, original content is not that easy to come by.

5. Account Level

Whether it is your own personal homepage or someone else's personal homepage, the account level is obvious.

Among them, they are named and divided into various types of potatoes. How to upgrade has been written in great detail on the Xiaohongshu account level page, so I will not go into details. From this, you can see that while upgrading the account level, completing these tasks is actually helping us to cultivate our own account. We do not need to upgrade the level just for the sake of upgrading the level, but can complete the upgrade without realizing it.

Another point to note: Deleting posts or publishing illegal notes! It will affect the level! And there is a chance of being demoted! Downgrading will reduce the account level weight!

6. Whether you are a brand partner

7. Have you signed a contract with MCN?

Putting these two together, in simple terms, after reaching the brand partner qualification, applying for brand partner means signing with Hongwen Culture (Xiaohongshu's official agency) by default. If you have other MCNs that can be signed, just contact the other MCN directly. They will report and sign offline. Brand partners represent the high-quality account group of Xiaohongshu to a certain extent, and their account weight will be increased, but they will not directly support traffic.

So why do I need to separate these two items? Because there is a mystery here. Will the MCN that signs with the official have more traffic than that of a third party? Although the official emphasis is that there is no such thing, Hongwen has used private messages and other means to vigorously promote its own MCN. Its uniqueness compared to other MCNs is self-evident.

2. Note weight rule algorithm

After talking about the account weight rules, let’s talk about the note rules. To a certain extent, the note weight rules are more useful than the account weight, because it is an important rule that directly determines the traffic of a single note. For example, if there are not many good projects in the account weight, does that mean the note has no chance of going viral? The answer is of course no. There is still a chance, but the probability is smaller than that of accounts with higher weights. Let's break down the weight rules of notes in detail.

1. Originality

The word "original" has appeared repeatedly in my notes countless times, and I am a little reluctant to mention it again, but I must emphasize it once, because originality can increase the weight of my notes. As shown in the figure, the weight of originality is -99-5 points, which means that the weight score of originality is given according to the originality of the text and pictures of the note. If the number of words exceeds 100, but the originality is less than 60%, the weight will be close to -99, in other words, "limited flow" in standard Xiaohongshu terms. The higher your originality, the more weighted scores you can get, up to 5 points.

2. Conversion rate

Here is a detailed description of the working principle of Xiaohongshu's big data + artificial intelligence push. First of all, Xiaohongshu will collect your external and internal characteristics. What are external characteristics? It means the various information you fill in, such as gender, region, school, birthday, and even the interests you filled in when you first registered your account, as well as your collections, etc. Then what are internal characteristics? It is to form your entire personality through big data analysis based on your external characteristics. In other words, it is a common term in the Internet industry, called user portrait. For example, if you are a girl, your age meets the fertility characteristics, your recent notes contain marriage or related words, and you have frequently browsed maternal and child products recently, the system will know that you are pregnant. This is a form of analysis; let's talk about the working principle of push. After you post a note, the system will extract the main features of the note and label it, such as mother and baby, pregnant women, etc. At this time, it will be redirected and pushed to the corresponding small number of people according to the account and note weight. If the conversion rate is good, it will continue to be pushed to a large number of people. If the conversion rate is not enough, the distribution will be ended in advance. Notes can only enter the information flow of keywords, and traffic will rely entirely on search, but the information flow of keywords is also ranked, and the weight determines the ranking of your notes under keywords.

Now let's talk about the conversion rate. This conversion rate has been mentioned last time. When the note is first released, it will be pushed to a small range of users for browsing based on the tags. This conversion rate is forwarding, commenting, collecting, and likes.

The weight relationship is: forward>comment>collection>like.

From here, it is not difficult to see that Xiaohongshu sets the forwarding as the first priority in weight. Sharing outside the site to gain more traffic also means that the note is more valuable. Liking on the Internet is just a basic statement, which is difficult to reflect the value judgment of the work, so the weight of comments and collections will be higher. The weight of this part will be more expandable, and will continue to increase based on the ratio of the number of visits to the conversion rate of these items, but the upper limit is limited. Once it reaches the passing line, the weight of this part will no longer increase.

This is what I mentioned about creating basic data in the Xiaohongshu KOL guide "The Secret of Popular Notes". It's about improving conversion rates through manual intervention. However, you should do this as early as possible, because as the exposure increases, the requirements for data such as likes on your notes will also be higher, and it will be difficult at that time. But don’t inflate the volume! Once a zombie account is identified, it will directly affect the blogger’s account weight.

3. Content length

I also mentioned the word count issue of notes in the Xiaohongshu KOL guide "The Secret of Popular Notes". Content with a length of more than 600 words is considered to meet the qualification requirements and can obtain weight points for the content length. Conversely, if it is less than 600 words, the weight of this part will not be increased. Practice has proved that it is effective.

4. Keywords

Keywords are the keywords mentioned in your article or in the title, and their relevance to the entire note. If the relevance is relatively small, the system will think that you may be posting keywords randomly to maliciously divert traffic, and the weight of this part will be deducted. The solution, of course, is to post normal notes. Do not post keywords that do not match your content.

5. Tags

The tag weight check is divided into two parts. One part is to look at the content of the tag, which of course cannot be an advertisement. The other part is the difference between adding it and not adding it. If we want to rank our notes high or reach the top level, we must pay attention to every detail. Only when it is added will it have weight!

6. Topics

The theories of topics and tags are similar, but one part checks the relevance of the topic, while the other part is the difference between adding and not adding. In addition, we should be more cautious in choosing topics, which determines the indexing problem of our later traffic in search. If we choose a very weak topic, we will be a little far away from the search traffic in the future.

7. Prohibited words

The reason why banned words are singled out is mainly because of comments. Everyone knows that notes will be restricted if they have banned words, but the same is true for comments. If other users' replies contain banned words, you either report them or delete them. Otherwise, it's not just a weight issue, but direct restriction. That's what -99 means.

The above are the algorithms and rules for Xiaohongshu account weight and note weight. Now let’s calculate the weight score. How much is considered passing?

Calculated using the weights in our graph:

10 (original image points) + 10 (conversion rate) + 4 (length, keywords, etc.) = 24 points

We believe that 24 points is a normal weight score for an upper-middle note. Of course, if it is an excellent note, the conversion rate weight of the note will be increased. Considering that the account itself has a certain additional weight, the effect of an excellent note can be as high as 1-2 times of 24 points. What if we have a note of average quality?

5 (original image points) + 0 (conversion rate) + 2 (length, keywords, etc.) = 7 points

Do you see how big the gap is?

In addition to the system's weight rules, there is also a manually intervened editorial recommendation. After being screened by the editor, the weight will be directly increased and even pushed by the App, but this is another matter.

The significance of note ranking

Note ranking brings great commercial value. Recently, some people came to learn the operation of Xiaohongshu and did some promotion of personal stores. The promotion was very regional and limited to a certain city. They didn’t understand the concept of excellent notes on Xiaohongshu before, so they regarded Xiaohongshu as something similar to Weibo and directly posted advertisements for their various stores. Of course, it would have no effect, so they would find some third parties to directly brush the rankings to occupy the top few positions of keywords. This method used to be very cost-effective. As long as you paid, it was equivalent to buying advertising space. However, the cost of this operation method has also greatly increased. It is not cost-effective and difficult to sustain. Moreover, because the quality of the advertising notes is really poor, what does it matter even if you rank first?

So what I hope everyone can understand is that rankings can bring great effects and economic value, but if you don’t use them, it will be useless. This is a typical waste of resources. Even if you are ranked high, it can only last for a period of time. If you don’t continue to increase your volume, it will fall. But will it be of any help to you in the long run? No.

Therefore, being a KOL or creating content is actually a long-term investment. It will not only bring growth to your note, but also help your entire life. So how can you use your own advantages to build your own personal IP? How can you quickly help yourself locate yourself?

At least one-third of the students who have come to see me recently have unclear positioning and don’t know how to position themselves. Moreover, their thought processes are often very strange. They think they can do this and that, and there seems to be nothing they cannot do. This is a typical case of unclear positioning. In fact, being a KOL is similar to starting a business. You must clearly check your own situation in the following order to come up with your positioning.

1) Own advantages

Your own advantages come first. When we consider becoming an excellent KOL, what is more important is not luck, but rational analysis. Therefore, it is easier to succeed if you highlight your advantages and do what you are good at. So here you have to think about what I did in my previous career experience? What am I good at? List them on your paper in the order they come.

2) Advantage Matching

Based on the population of Xiaohongshu, are my advantages and expertise meaningful to the population of Xiaohongshu? Of course, there is a misunderstanding here that you think everything is useful. Don’t consider the situation of “what if it has been useful before?” For example, for groups like Xiaohongshu, do you think it makes sense to teach square dancing? Some people have very strange thought processes and think, what if someone is watching... This is not rational thinking and is ultimately just a waste of time, so a match is a match and a mismatch is a mismatch.

3) Hobbies

Interest is the best teacher, I deeply agree with this statement, it will greatly give you the motivation to continue learning and operating. If there are multiple options left on the paper you wrote after matching, then choose what you love.

Next, after we have determined the positioning, we need to package our own IP. In fact, most of the IP packaging comes from external features. What does this mean? It means that users can only form an impression of you based on what you reveal on the outside.

Let’s take the simplest example. If your age is 50, your gender is female, and you live in Beijing, and the content you post is all about Beijing’s alleys (without selfies), what impression will it give to others? Isn’t this just a 50-year-old Beijing aunt? Similarly, if you write that you are 20 years old, female, live in Beijing, and often post campus-related content, the impression you give to others is naturally that you are a 20-year-old Beijing female student.

Let's go a little deeper. If you write that you are 20 years old, female, live in Beijing, and often post some English learning tips on campus, the impression given by others will be more complete. Let's give an example: you write that you are 20 years old, female, live in Beijing, occasionally post learning tips on campus, occasionally go out for travel, occasionally post beauty posts, occasionally post food posts, occasionally post vlogs of casual chats, and occasionally post... You understand without me saying it. It will not form any impression on others. If you cannot highlight your own IP image, you will not become an IP. To put it simply, no one will be willing to pay attention to you.

Based on my examples above, I believe you can completely position yourself and set up your own IP image.

At the end of the article, let’s summarize what you need to master in this article:

1. What is the note ranking?

2. Xiaohongshu account weight;

3. How Xiaohongshu works:

4. Note weight of Xiaohongshu;

5. How to use Xiaohongshu’s note ranking

Related reading:

1. Do you know the operation and promotion strategy of Xiaohongshu?

2. There are 7 ways to promote on Xiaohongshu. Have you ever made a mistake?

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. It only takes 3 steps to attract traffic and promote Xiaohongshu!

8. Xiaohongshu promotion: Xiaohongshu’s growth path from 0 to 100-200 million users!

9. Complete Xiaohongshu traffic promotion plan!

10. Xiaohongshu promotion method | Is the grass-planting list still credible?

11. Xiaohongshu Promotion: After cleaning up the KOL, can we still “plant grass” well?

12. Xiaohongshu promotion strategy, big data + 3 major strategies!

13. Xiaohongshu promotion skills and operation strategies!

14. Xiaohongshu promotion tips: How to operate a Xiaohongshu account?

15. Xiaohongshu “cleans up KOLs” and content e-commerce reaches a crossroads!

16. Xiaohongshu’s promotion strategies and methods!

17.What are the ways to promote Xiaohongshu?

18. What is the promotion method of Xiaohongshu? How to promote Xiaohongshu?

19. How can advertisers use Xiaohongshu KOL to promote Xiaohongshu?

author: Mr. Elk Sky

source: Mr. Elk Sky