Xiaohongshu operation: the logic of e-commerce of content that attracts people, the dividends are still there!

Xiaohongshu, marking my life. From 2013 to now, in five years, the number of users has exceeded 200 million. People born in the 1990s and 1995s have become the most active group on this platform.

From the cold start, we only served female users who planned to go shopping in Hong Kong, to female users who were interested in overseas purchases, to online shoppers who bought cross-border goods without leaving their homes, and to today's lifestyle sharing platform. The target user scale has been expanding, so the content direction is also becoming wider and more numerous.

Users record the positive energy and wonderful life of young people of this era by sharing text, pictures, and video notes. Xiaohongshu uses machine learning to accurately and efficiently match massive amounts of information and people.

Speaking of planting grass, I heard this term in early 2018. I didn’t know what it was at first, but after some research, I found out that it is the "burying clues" in the marketing theory that we all knew before. In the marketing era dominated by search engines, burying clues is very popular.

Xiaohongshu has become an effective way of Internet marketing.

Xiaohongshu's main users are young girls born in the 1990s who live in first- and second-tier developed cities and love beauty and pursue a refined life. For this group of people, Xiaohongshu’s content positioning is to provide them with relevant content on fashion, skin care, and lifestyle.

There are two forms of content: notes and videos. They are relatively simple to operate and all of us can play with them. We can share our own physical stores and good products.

There are basically three sources of content: UGC (user-generated content), PGC (professionally produced content), and PUGC (professional user-generated content).

UGC (User Generated Content): This part accounts for the largest proportion of Xiaohongshu's content, and is the part that every ordinary user can do. In order to encourage users to produce high-quality content, it is divided into 10 levels.

PGC (Professionally Produced Content): Xiaohongshu has many vertical official accounts that produce some professional content by themselves, especially the operation of hot topic content. This is very good. If all the content is user-generated, it will lose its benchmark function and the content will become increasingly rough.

PUGC (Professional User Generated Content): This is more obvious, that is, third parties produce professional content, such as inviting self-media people, Internet celebrities, big names, stars, etc. from other platforms. These people are attractive in themselves and will bring a large number of fans to the platform.

Produce content based on good products

Xiaohongshu’s previous positioning was to find good overseas products, which means that from the very beginning it had the attributes of an e-commerce company, sharing food, drink, entertainment, and lifestyle, all of which were socialized to goods and services.

When using Xiaohongshu, you can also post related product experiences on a sharing social platform. Including beauty, personal care, sports, travel, home, hotel, food, etc.

Xiaohongshu will classify the content you post, match it with corresponding tags, and recommend it to the corresponding interested users.

Then, according to the quality of the picture and the level of the account, give corresponding weights. This method will appear relatively fair.

Here are the characteristics of high-quality notes and videos, which are also the most basic standards.

Three major features:

1. Create value for users. High-quality notes and videos will definitely benefit users after watching them. This benefit is generally reflected in certain user actions, such as likes, favorites, comments, shares, and following bloggers.

2. It can be classified, that is, according to the official categories, the content you publish can be clearly divided, so that it can be matched with users relatively accurately. For example, there is no category for jokes and gags on Xiaohongshu. If you post such content, it cannot be classified and will not receive official recommendations.

3. It can be integrated at will and is extensible, which means that the pictures are of a certain quality, the text is beautiful and meaningful, and the editor can process your content and put it under a matching topic.

Recommended operation strategy

The content of Xiaohongshu tends to be leisure and entertainment, just like the traffic of WeChat Moments. In any fragmented time, the push should follow the user's living habits and reading habits in the time dimension. Xiaohongshu avoids users’ working hours and generally pushes messages every two hours; message notifications are generally pushed during users’ rest time at noon or in the evening after get off work.

In terms of push channels, users are differentiated according to their levels or usage time. Each stage is a channel and different strategies are adopted.

For example, during the novice period, we use machine algorithms and high-quality popular recommendations, which is a strategy aimed at users who have just registered, to allow users to choose the industries they are interested in and their own interests. The next step is to recommend some high-quality users, celebrities, or experts based on their selected interests, mainly using high-quality content to retain new users. The next step is to recommend some of the user’s friends, which is also for retention. These few simple steps are also preparing for user portraits and subsequent marketing.

The second stage is the growth stage. Based on the user's browsing habits, the content of the notes is published and relevant recommendations are made, including hot topic recommendations, information recommendations of people followed, and recommendations of nearby people.

The benefit of implementing a recommendation system is that as long as you can write good content, you don’t have to worry about the number of readers. Its essence is the same as the recommendation system of Toutiao, Tencent News, etc.

Open up all new media channels and build yourself into a self-media on third-party platforms.

This is what I have always advocated: create content once and distribute it through all channels. For large platforms like Xiaohongshu, it is not a simple push, the focus is on user operations and conversion, how to convert users to their own APP.

For example, Xiaohongshu’s WeChat official account: Xiaohongshu APP; Weibo, Xiaohongshu APP official Weibo; it has an advantage in naming, directly telling users that I have an APP. When publishing content, there is no need to over-emphasize that I have an APP, which violates the regulations of the third-party platform.

At the same time, advertising on variety shows, especially entertainment programs that are popular among post-90s generation, such as "Idol Producer" and "Produce 101", has brought about a surge in the number of users.

Content social e-commerce logic

Xiaohongshu is based on high-quality lifestyle content. Through this content, it discovers and understands products, forms a product reputation database, and then distributes it to different users through machine analysis of user portraits. This is a complete content operation method.

It is about discussing and sharing products. When it reaches a certain stage, there will be a certain number of users and activity, as well as product reputation data support, so e-commerce comes into being.

There are two ways to cooperate: self-operated shopping malls and third-party platforms. Products are made based on user word-of-mouth about the products, which to a certain extent ensures the match between products and users.

This is something that many people in social e-commerce should learn. In the early stages, you must create enough content to make users trust you before considering selling goods. Xiaohongshu also makes content social e-commerce a reality, allowing everyone to see how to communicate with users through content and ultimately transform it into e-commerce.

Gathering a large amount of original content from experts as a breakthrough for a certain product or brand can easily trigger a cluster effect. That is, when you search for a certain product or post, many experts’ shares will appear.

It is the same as reading other users’ comments when shopping on e-commerce platforms. It also encourages major brands to come to Xiaohongshu to promote their products and maintain their brand reputation.

It is conceivable that if there are advertising resources of hundreds of Xiaohongshu influencers, it would be very easy to build a brand's reputation on Xiaohongshu, and it just so happens that many marketing companies are doing this.

Source: He Guanwu