Xiaohongshu Promotion丨How to quickly create popular notes!

I have a strong interest in customer acquisition, whether as a client brand acquiring customers through new media, or as a media person acquiring customers through content. What I want to share with you today is some tips on how to build a Xiaohongshu account with over 10,000 fans in a short period of time.

The Xiaohongshu account "Miss Gabby" that I personally operate has been in operation for about 3 months, with a total of 42 notes, 21,000 followers, 70,000 likes and collections, a cumulative exposure of more than 1 million, and the highest number of readings of a single note is 350,000. Relatively speaking, this data is still quite good, but unfortunately, with a wave of the hand by Xiaohongshu a few days ago, my brand partner status was also revoked. As for the part about brand partners that everyone has been concerned about recently, I will share it with you at the end.

Today’s sharing is as follows:

1. How to position Xiaohongshu well?
2. How to create a replicable hit note?
3. How to increase followers using unusual techniques
4. How will the new regulations on brand partners impact you?

01 Account Positioning

Before positioning Xiaohongshu, let’s take a brief look at the data of these two groups of users:

In January 2019, Xiaohongshu had more than 200 million users, with 10 million daily active users;

Women account for 87.24%, 19-35 years old account for nearly 80%, and those born in the 1990s and 1995s are the most active;

Both sets of data reflect one message: Xiaohongshu's user group is young female users. So you must not target your positioning or content towards men, otherwise all the content that follows will be meaningless to you.

First of all, these three premises apply to all platforms, including Xiaohongshu:

Regarding the positioning of media accounts (such as beauty accounts, emotional accounts, travel accounts, etc.), Xiaohongshu has stronger compatibility. It is not a bad idea for one account to have two or three highly related positionings. For example, an English learning account can also be positioned as overseas life and travel. However, some categories, especially those focusing on food cooking method videos, should not be mixed with other positionings. The future monetization ability of accounts with a single positioning will be further hindered.

Continuously output content that matches your positioning. Post a food post today, a beauty post tomorrow, and a game recommendation the day after tomorrow. Content that doesn’t match your positioning is unlikely to be recommended and followed by fans.

Avoid being contrary to the characteristics of the channel. For example, Xiaohongshu is dominated by young female users, who post elderly health care content every day. This is contrary to the characteristics of the channel.

02 Create a hit product

The second part is the focus of today’s sharing, which is how to create replicable popular content.

Content is the key. The better you grasp these dimensions, the higher the probability of hitting the recommendation mechanism.

The first tip for creating explosive content is to choose scarce content under a big theme.

Many friends who have experience in operating public accounts know the skills of searching for hot spots, such as looking at Baidu's real-time hot spots, Weibo hot searches, and searching for keywords. But on Xiaohongshu, I suggest you focus on the hot searches and hot topics on the homepage of Xiaohongshu. Hot search topics are suitable for keeping up with quickly, just like other platforms that focus on effectiveness when chasing hot topics; but in terms of the possibility of note recommendations, outputting scarce content on hot topics is more likely to be recommended.

For example, travel has always been a hot topic on Xiaohongshu. Thailand is a popular tourist country, and Hotel A is a popular hotel for local tourists. If you recommend this hotel at this time, the possibility of your note being recommended by the system is very small, because there are too many notes about this hotel, and popular notes have already been generated. If you flip through five or six pages under this keyword, you will still find notes with tens of thousands or even thousands of likes. If you still follow them, it will be a huge challenge. Douyin’s theory of “constant hits” is not entirely applicable to Xiaohongshu.

But if you try to recommend some unpopular high-quality hotels, your notes will be labeled "scarce" by the system. If your material is excellent, it is very likely to go viral, just like the Shijiazhuang Castle Hotel recommended by Miss Gaby, which has 128,000 views. Once the note was published, it would show 99+ messages every few minutes when it was opened for a week, and Ctrip was fully booked. This was the first recommended note, when Miss Gaby had less than 500 fans on Xiaohongshu. Before I posted this note, there were only three or five notes about this hotel on Xiaohongshu, with low likes and average graphics and text.

To create a popular note on Xiaohongshu, you need to understand that the appearance of the material is important, but the saturation of the content is even more important.

Xiaohongshu is a high-value sharing community, but the value of the materials does not equal the value of the content. Content such as beauty and fashion, of course, places great emphasis on appearance. Without appearance, the entire note will collapse. I once recommended a very ordinary swimsuit, but in order to take a good picture, I spent an afternoon sunbathing on the beach in the Philippines. When the note was published, there were less than 100 followers, but the video had 67,000 views and more than 200 comments lined up to purchase the link, proving that amateur bloggers can also bring goods.

For any text note, the appearance of the material and the saturation of the content are standard, especially for travel or store exploration content. This travel guide to the Philippines that I shared has been read 40,000 times and forwarded 299 times. The beautiful illustrations sparked fans' interest in the place. The saturated content created value, prompting fans to collect, follow and share it.

However, some users share very down-to-earth content such as women's private care or removing dead skin from the soles of the feet (don't be biased, after all, there are many female groups and this type of content has a lot of attention). In this case, the pictures can hardly be very beautiful. At this time, the saturation of the content is particularly important. The saturation here is defined as clear interpretation of the content that can bring practical value to users. For example, when writing about traveling in the Philippines, the notes should be positioned to tell you what you need to pay attention to. Content saturation is the key. At this time, you don’t need to worry too much about whether the pictures are exquisite. You just need to make the first picture into a big poster to attract fans to read the content.

So, don’t be lazy. The upper limit of characters for notes on Xiaohongshu is 1,000 words. I personally think that a text note can be considered saturated if it has at least 500 words. After all, Xiaohongshu is positioned as a community for sharing a beautiful life, not a picture community or a video community, so think about it carefully.

03 Fan Growth

The next few tips I will share will be combined with the third point because the two are highly correlated.

By acquiring customers through content and generating content with public opinion, Xiaohongshu's recommendation mechanism is very similar to that of Douyin. Both are centered around "content that users care about." In simple terms, for example, if you search for or frequently click on travel-related notes, the system will continuously recommend travel-related notes to you; fans who follow you will also often receive content that you like to collect, or content that you participate in and interact with.

Fan interaction is critical because every interaction from fans can prompt the system to recommend your notes to more users. This is easy to understand. The more practical value a content can bring to fans, the more it will be liked and collected. Here we will focus on content techniques on how to quickly stimulate fan comments and interactions.

The first trick is to make your fans “need something from you.” For example, sharing a great place to pique the interest of fans, but not disclosing the address, so that fans can ask; recommending a beautiful dress but not telling where to buy it; Miss Gaby once shared a note recommending social software, which had 74,000 reads. It recommended an software called "Singles Village", which fans were very interested in. However, Singles Village requires new users to be recommended by registered users. Fans had to trouble the blogger for help with the recommendation. Almost all of the 300 comments were asking for recommendations, and there were also hundreds of people asking for recommendations in private messages. Miss Gaby recommended more than 100 people to become users of Singles Village.

Another benefit derived from this technique is that after you "help" your fans, you can confidently ask them to like your notes! At this time, few fans would refuse to do the favor. This method saves a lot of effort in attracting interaction.

The second tip is to produce “imperfect content”. For example, this note by Miss Gaby made a small mistake, which led to heated debate in the comments section.

The castle hotel recommended in this note is located in the Hebei Academy of Fine Arts. Miss Gaby described the Hebei Academy of Fine Arts as "one of the eight major art academies" in the note. Some fans corrected her in the comment section and expressed mixed opinions about the Hebei Academy of Fine Arts. Student fans of the Hebei Academy of Fine Arts were dissatisfied that their school was not well received. As a result, for a note recommending a hotel, half of the more than 200 comments asked about how to book the hotel, and the other half were disputing the Hebei Academy of Fine Arts.

The third technique is to focus on topics that are highly controversial in public opinion. Take this note as an example, which shares a book called "Don't Get Married Before 30". The marriage age of women is a very public topic. Sure enough, the comments gathered a large number of fans to express their own opinions, or agree with and criticize others' opinions, which is very exciting.

Fourth, about the distribution techniques of cover images, titles and keywords. Many people ask, should the cover picture be made into a big-character poster quickly by imitating TikTok? I can only say that this is a good way to try. From the perspective of fans, this method is more attractive to clicks; but if you pay close attention to the discovery page on the homepage of Xiaohongshu, you will rarely see large-character posters filling the entire screen. I think this is due to the tone positioning of the Xiaohongshu platform. Compared with the poster cover, the title and keyword tags have a greater impact on gaining exposure. Once you have a certain number of followers, you cannot have multiple topics, but you can have multiple tags. The more keywords the title or text covers, the higher the probability that fans will search for the keyword and see the note.

The exposure growth of Xiaohongshu is long-term, and the life cycle of Xiaohongshu notes is longer than that of any other platform. 24 hours after a WeChat post is published, the reading data is basically stable; but when Xiaohongshu’s content is just started, the interaction and reading volume are very few, but even after a month or so, there is still a chance to turn around, and even a large amount of exposure continues for more than half a year. The key to the turnaround still lies in the content quality and user interaction.

However, you will know whether your Xiaohongshu note will be recommended by the system (meaning that there will be 99+ message notifications as soon as the note is published) the moment it is published, and you don’t need to wait. If there are no 99+ messages, you need to actively "find a way" to increase the interaction. "Finding a way" is not very useful on the WeChat platform. It may be useful when the note is just published on the Douyin platform, but it is definitely useful on the Xiaohongshu platform, even if the note has been published for many days. According to the content arrangement rules that appear when searching for keywords on Xiaohongshu, the interaction volume that you "find ways" to increase will make your notes appear in a more prominent position, which means that you have occupied a good advertising position. If your content is valuable (you have to understand that valuable notes will not necessarily be recommended by the system), then fans will still be happy to participate in the interaction. The real interaction volume will come in, and your notes will get more recommendations, which will gradually form a virtuous circle.

Finally, is Xiaohongshu better for written notes or video notes? I think Vlog videos are a trend, but there is no clear conclusion, at least there is no clear positioning at the moment. You might as well ask yourself whether you are better at videos or writing? Is your content better positioned in video or text format? For example, if your content is positioned to improve English speaking skills, video format is better. But if you are positioned to create an emotional account, text format is easier to control. Moreover, text content is more conducive to being shared with other grass-planting communities. Compared with the form, the frequency of note publishing and content creation are more important.

04 How to deal with the new regulations

Finally, let’s talk about the “brand partner upgrade” that has attracted much attention in recent days. Xiaohongshu officially requires that to become a brand partner, three conditions must be met at the same time: “personal certification, more than 5K fans, and more than 10,000 average page views of notes in the past month.” For those who do not meet these three requirements, it is said that 4/3 of the KOL brand partner status has been revoked, and only more than 5,000 partners are left from the original more than 20,000 partners. This incident has sparked heated discussions on the Internet.

After this incident, many friends from advertising agencies came to ask me about my situation, and it seemed that advertising agencies regarded KOLs who retained their brand partner status as rare and dug them up like crazy.

As one of the 20,000 brand partners officially certified by Little Red, frankly speaking, I am a little surprised by the popularity of this event. When looking at this matter, I personally think that we need to look beyond the phenomenon to see the essence.

Because I have updated my notes very infrequently in the last one or two months, the exposure of my notes in the last month was less than 10,000, so they were also revoked. For me, the difference between revoking and not revoking is not big in terms of function. I don’t know how many of you who are listening to me are already operating Xiaohongshu or have been Xiaohongshu’s brand partners. Let me briefly introduce the rights and interests of Xiaohongshu’s brand partners.

There are no adjustments to your rights and interests under the new regulations. Brand partners will enjoy three rights and interests.

Personally, I think these benefits are not that attractive. For example, the first point, commercial traffic monetization, is a bit like Tik Tok or Weibo. If you want to publish commercial advertisements, you need to report it, otherwise you may be restricted or your account may be blocked. It seems very serious. However, the platform attributes of Xiaohongshu are obviously different from those of Douyin. Xiaohongshu’s predecessor was an overseas shopping sharing community with innate e-commerce attributes. Its content generally shares good things. How does Xiaohongshu define commercial and non-commercial? What do you think about this issue?

There is also the issue of traffic limit on Xiaohongshu. For new accounts, Xiaohongshu has a stage similar to "newbie support". For example, when you first post notes, you can follow many topics, and you will obviously find that the notes can easily get more exposure and interaction. However, when the number of fans reaches a certain level, the notes basically have no chance of being recommended by the platform, and all exposure has to rely on one's own efforts, no matter how good the content of the notes is. I have observed the product recommendation notes that advertisers have published, and the identity of a brand partner does not help much with exposure.

The second benefit, the data analysis tool, actually only tells you the exposure of the notes and the increase in each period. In fact, the exposure data can be viewed directly in the background, and the flow has been limited. What is the significance of this analysis tool?

The third benefit is that basically all the advertisements of Xiaohongshu KOLs come from agents, and the current role of the platform in this regard is not particularly significant.

When the brand partner qualification is revoked, perhaps what KOLs are sad about is not that they no longer enjoy these rights and interests, but that they have lost a title. In traditional concepts, it seems that without this title, you will lose a lot of advertising opportunities. I cannot completely deny the value of brand partners. I believe that after Xiaohongshu raises the threshold, it will upgrade the rights of brand partners in the near future. For account owners who are determined to develop on Xiaohongshu, they still need to maintain a positive attitude to deal with it.

The above analysis of the rights of Xiaohongshu brand partners roughly explains my personal opinion on what rights you have lost and what you have lost. Many KOLs may be concerned about how the client brand views this incident and how much impact it will have on future advertising.

The essence of KOL placement is to use the personal endorsement of the media owner, achieve order conversion and brand benefits with the help of content, and use conversion as the standard for effect evaluation. In the past few years of working in media placement, I have handled placements worth tens of millions. For the Xiaohongshu channel, content quality and comment interaction are the most important criteria for selecting KOLs. The stickiness between Xiaohongshu fans and account owners is far less than that of WeChat and Weibo. In view of the life cycle and recommendation mechanism of Xiaohongshu notes, the creative ability of KOLs is particularly important.

Before preparing the sharing article, I specifically communicated with several Party A brands that focused on the Xiaohongshu channel. Most of them said that the identity of a brand partner is just icing on the cake. Moreover, the market for inflating traffic is prevalent, and the focus is always on the owner's creative ability and fan interaction. Therefore, the core competitiveness of KOL is the content created with care, which is the skill to solve all anxiety.

Advertisers care about the brand partner status of the account owner. What they care about is nothing more than the actual exposure in the recent period. Secondly, they want to have a pass when they want to deliver solid advertising content. Here is a piece of data to share. The exposure of notes on Xiaohongshu is extremely irregular. For example, the reading exposure of WeChat headlines is relatively stable. For example, if the account has 100,000 fans, the non-advertising content headlines can basically remain in a relatively stable range. However, Xiaohongshu hardly plays by the rules. It is common for an account with more than 100,000 fans to publish notes with only a few hundred exposures in a week. Usually the real likes/fans conversion rate is 10%-20%, that is, if 10 people like your post, probably one or two of them will become your fans.

So, how should account owners deal with the new regulations? In addition to being committed to creating high-quality content, I strongly recommend that you do a good job of distributing the content.

Are there any other platforms similar to Xiaohongshu? For relatively mature travel content, you can distribute it on Mafengwo. Food content can be distributed on Dianping.com, beauty content can be distributed on NetEase Kaola, etc. You can try it based on the attributes of the content. There are also some new platforms, such as Baidu's "Xifan", which can synchronize content.

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!

Author: Miss Gaby

Source: Miss Gaby