Taking Xiaohongshu as an example, let’s talk about data analysis!

Xiaohongshu has become one of the fastest growing social media platforms in China. Unlike WeChat and Weibo, Xiaohongshu focuses on beauty and fashion. In fact, the content of Xiaohongshu in its early stages was quite diverse, mainly focusing on various lifestyles.

Since Xiaohongshu has not yet gone public, the company has almost no public data. In order to better use data to analyze and understand the platform, I used crawlers to obtain user information and performed data analysis based on the crawled information.

How to get the data?

Xiaohongshu has a website for the web. Although the initial homepage has limited content that can be crawled, we can identify links to user profile pages and crawl the commenter's profile and posted content.

Data size

Xiaohongshu has a very strict anti-crawling mechanism to prevent crawlers, so in order to obtain large-scale data, IP conversion must be performed. Over a period of 4 days, I scraped 899,519 user information from the platform. Although this only represents a small part of Xiaohongshu’s massive user data, these users all have relevant actions on the platform (posting, creating content, or commenting on other people’s content). Therefore, this dataset can be used to identify the characteristics of active users in Xiaohongshu.

Indicator Interpretation

Xiaohongshu provides users with three ways to interact. Users can like, collect and comment on the content they like. The “Like” feature is similar to the Facebook like feature, and the “Favorite” feature is to save the content for further reading later.

Generally speaking, people will "like" content that interests them, and "collect" content that they can refer to later, such as practical tips and recommended products. The third indicator is "comments", which reflects the interactivity of the content. Unfortunately, it is difficult to crawl and track Xiaohongshu comments, so this article will not include comment metrics.

Most influential users

Top 10 users (excluding official accounts):

Fan Bingbing

Jelly Lin

Angela Zhang

Ritatawang

Fashionable lady

Ling

Listen to the rain

Irene Lin Enru

Ouyang Nana

Meiqi is me

Celebrities are keen to join this emerging platform. In addition to celebrities, the most influential users on Xiaohongshu include many internet celebrities . Among them, Ritatawang and Meiqi were the ones I didn’t have much influence on before I joined Xiaohongshu.

Male users

A key feature of Xiaohongshu is that its users are mainly women. Our data shows that only 2% of its total users are male. More than 60% of users did not indicate their gender.

After removing users who did not indicate their gender, it was found that women accounted for 95% of the total number of users. This is similar to our expectations, as the majority of content on Xiaohongshu is targeted at women, including various beauty products and fashion-related content.

Although male users only account for 5% of the total number of users on Xiaohongshu, their influence cannot be underestimated.

After counting the content posted by male and female influencers separately, we found that the number of "likes" for male influencers' content accounted for 8% of the total;

At the same time, the number of "collections" of male influencers' content accounts for 5.9% of the total, which is slightly lower than the percentage of "likes", but still higher than the percentage of their gender.

The explanation for this gap is that the content posted by male influencers on Xiaohongshu is interesting, but readers do not necessarily want to read it again later. On the other hand, the content posted by female influencers is more worth reading later.

In terms of scope of influence, male users have greater influence. Male users have a higher number of followers on average. The average number of followers for men is over 2,400, far exceeding the 842 for women.

Interestingly, median and quartile analyses showed opposite results. The median number of fans for male users is 5, while that for female users is 11.75; the quartile results also show that the coverage rate of most male fans is lower than that of female users.

So why do male users have more followers on average?

After analyzing the gender distribution of influencers with 10,000 and 100,000 or more followers, the reason becomes clear. There are some male influencers on Xiaohongshu, many of whom have more than 10 million followers. These people have a strong influence and therefore also affect the statistics. On the other hand, a few male users who are not big Vs are not particularly active.

Geographical distribution of users

Xiaohongshu is well-known for its high sales conversion rate . Users on the platform tend to have a strong interest in purchasing high-end beauty and fashion products. Many people refer to Xiaohongshu as a “grass-planting platform,” which basically means that people search for products they are interested in and ultimately want to buy.

Most of the products mentioned on Xiaohongshu are international brands , so users usually have high purchasing power. So where are these users distributed?

As we all know, most high-income groups are mainly distributed in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangdong. Does the user base fit this demographic?

We started analyzing the user location data. Since Xiaohongshu sets the user’s location to “Other” by default, we see that only 40% of users enter meaningful location information. At the same time, the location information entered by some users is not specific. In this article, for analysis purposes we focus only on users who have indicated their location at the provincial or municipal level.

The top five provinces and cities in terms of users are Guangdong, Shanghai, Beijing, Zhejiang and Jiangsu, accounting for more than 30% of the entire user base. Xiaohongshu is headquartered in Shanghai, which explains why Shanghai is its main user base. Guangdong Province accounts for the largest share of total GDP and also includes the two major cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, so it is not surprising that the number of users in Guangdong Province is large.

Although the quantitative distribution shows that Guangdong Province has the largest number of users, the quality of users, that is, the degree of user engagement, should also be taken into account when analyzing the geographical distribution of users.

In terms of "likes" and "collections", Shanghai leads.

Another interesting trend is that some of the influential people on Xiaohongshu live overseas. The main ones are located in countries such as Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. Compared with domestic big Vs, overseas big Vs have more fans.

Limitations

Since the data does not contain the entire user database, it may not be accurate in terms of user distribution. In addition, for the gender and location distribution analysis, since more than half of the users did not enter relevant information, it is difficult to generalize the conclusions to the entire user group. At the same time, since the users themselves input the information, the possibility of entering incorrect information cannot be ruled out.

in conclusion

• Users on Xiaohongshu are predominantly female (about 95%), but male users have a higher average influence.
• The most influential users on Xiaohongshu include celebrities and internet celebrities.
• Guangdong has the largest number of users, but Shanghai users have the greatest influence.
• There are a large number of overseas influencers living in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and other places, and they have stronger influence than other users.

Source: Martin Liu