Xiaohongshu bets on private domain traffic

02. User growth test

But this was definitely not the end. After that, Xiaohongshu made rapid progress in less than a year, and the number of users exceeded 300 million in just 9 months.

What does it mean to grow by 150 million in 9 months? This means that Xiaohongshu’s growth level in 9 months has reached the total accumulated in the previous 5 years! It's really amazing!

At that time, Xiaohongshu had almost become a must-have app for young women , and it spread among the female population at a viral speed. How could one keep up with fashion trends without Xiaohongshu? How would you know where to shop if not using Xiaohongshu? For a time, Xiaohongshu was extremely popular.

Even a steely man like me had to download Xiaohongshu at that time.

However, in the same month that Xiaohongshu announced its user base, that is, in July 2019, Xiaohongshu was taken off the shelves for rectification overnight. Although the reason for the rectification is still unknown, the crazy growth trend seemed to have been paused.

After that, Xiaohongshu never officially announced the number of users on the platform, nor the number of monthly active users.

However, according to the data indicators released by the industry's third-party data monitoring platform "Analysys Data":

As of February 2021, Xiaohongshu's monthly active users reached 138 million . It has been nearly a year and a half since July 2019, but the monthly active users seem to have only increased by 30% in this year and a half . Compared with the exponential growth in 2019, the current growth rate has undoubtedly slowed down, and it has slowed down a lot.

No matter what kind of Internet product it is, the number of users is the cornerstone of everything . Without users and traffic, there is no imagination.

Therefore, the slowdown in user growth is a problem that Xiaohongshu must solve thoroughly. There are multiple versions of solutions for acquiring users, but time waits for no one. It is impossible to try every path, so we can only pick the most likely one first.

What was Xiaohongshu’s user growth strategy in the past? It is through content-driven user growth that high-quality content is used to attract relevant people to register and retain them. This is also the core method for the success of all Internet communities. Even the cost of acquiring users is much lower than that of other types of platforms. This is also a huge advantage of community products.

Content-driven growth is the core strategy of the community, but the target audience has always been women and fashionable people. However, after 300 million users registered, this strategy is obviously not enough.

Because most of the fashionable women who should register have already registered,