36 Rules for Brand Operations on Xiaohongshu

Logically speaking, brands have to pursue more. They not only need to understand content operations, but also the marketing of the entire brand from a strategic perspective.

Therefore, today’s content will be a little more than what the blogger operates, but the content is slightly different, so I suggest you take a closer look.

Of course, the old rules apply: write whatever comes to mind.

1. Brands must firmly believe in one thing: there must be something fishy going on. This means that if a blogger sells something particularly cheap, you should think carefully about how it came about. After all, no one is a public welfare role in this process.

2. Generally, when I first enter an industry and don’t know much about it, I will not choose the highest quotation or the lowest one. I will usually choose the middle one, which is generally more stable. The same applies to choosing a service provider on Xiaohongshu. Even though it's cheap, it's a waste of money, so you can't say it's worth it.

3. If you don’t understand the rules of the Xiaohongshu platform, just let a third-party company do it and control some major processes and progress yourself. If you don’t understand the content and rules, the effect will be worse.

4. The enterprise account and brand account mentioned in Xiaohongshu are actually the same account. It was originally called brand account, and now it has been renamed enterprise account.

5. One business license can register up to 3 enterprise accounts.

6. The functions of an enterprise account are the same as those of an enterprise employee account, but the identity is different. You can have unlimited employee accounts and the price is 600 per year. You have to pay 600 yuan for annual inspection every year.

7. The most effective marketing on Xiaohongshu is still blogger marketing.

8. Continuing from the previous point, the meaning behind the blogger’s investment is the influence of consumption decisions by semi-acquaintances. I continue to be optimistic about 2021.

9. It seems that not many brand stores have achieved obvious results on Xiaohongshu so far. This effect means that they account for a portion of Taobao and Tmall sales, such as one third or something, but this is generally not achieved. However, labor costs are inevitable, and you can calculate for yourself whether it is cost-effective.

10. The goal of many startup brands is to achieve conversions on Xiaohongshu, but the KPI set for operations staff is to increase the number of followers on the corporate account... I think this is not reasonable, as increasing followers does not equal conversions.

11. When brands place ads and choose bloggers, they always consider vertical bloggers for placement. Is it possible to place ads across categories? I think that given the current state of Xiaohongshu, competition has not yet reached that stage, and the cost-effectiveness of vertical categories is still relatively high. When will you be able to invest in cross-category bloggers? That will definitely be when you can no longer afford to invest in vertical category bloggers. (Special categories do not have the option of choosing vertical bloggers, which is a special case)

12. The accounts of bloggers on Xiaohongshu with relatively high number of followers are mainly concentrated between 10,000 and 30,000. There are others as well, but not as many as these.

13. Brands should strive to have notes included, but they cannot go against the platform. It looks like an obvious advertisement, and they still want it to be included?

14. I have seen several spam accounts so far, which caused the entire brand to be directly blocked by Xiaohongshu. That is, the brand words were directly blocked and the related notes were also cleared. It was not worth it.

15. The brand owner suggested not to invest in French fries in the early stage of the campaign. A single note has a good effect, but it will not convert. Because on Xiaohongshu, the real conversion depends on the "word of mouth" of the majority of people. So it is better to save this money and use it to add popular articles in the later stage of the launch.

16. Xiaohongshu is always short of KOCs. Why? It is cost-effective and also the most effective.

17. The Dandelion platform (pgy.xiaohongshu) is a platform used to publish reporting notes and select personnel for cooperation. You need to log in with an enterprise account.

18. Enterprise account operation background (business.xiaohongshu.com) Xiaohongshu Enterprise Account PC background can manage account operations and place performance advertisements.

19. Is it better to place performance-based advertising yourself or use a third party? First of all, the money spent is the same. The third party earns the rebate from the recharge of Xiaohongshu. After all, you have invested a lot and have some experience. If you don’t understand it at all, it’s OK to use a third party. If you just want to give it a try, then you can just top up and invest by yourself, there is no need to find a third party.

20. If you see some performance ads, they show sponsorship. The reason is that the content of the corporate account’s performance ads is randomly displayed as sponsorship or advertising.

21. When you register for an enterprise account, you will be given a free enterprise topic. If you want to apply for a second one, you will feel that the free enterprise topic given to you is equivalent to giving you hundreds of thousands of dollars. After all, you have to pay so much money to apply for a second one...

22. Xiaohongshu’s advertising strategy must be combined with the brand’s overall marketing strategy. After all, Xiaohongshu is just a channel. Many brands come to me for consultation, and really, they ask me to give them quotations and strategies right away. I really can’t do it. There is no research or analysis. Anyone who can give me a strategy is a genius.

23. After the delivery strategy has been determined, the most important step in the delivery is number selection. The pitfall here is not whether the number is a fake number, which can generally be seen. The pitfall mainly lies in whether the tone is consistent. For example, a high-end home furnishing website chose a blogger who rents a house. This is obviously a mismatch in tone. Is it just because this blogger is 200 yuan cheaper?

24. We should have a sense of the overall situation. What we are investing in is the scale effect. If there is a problem with one account, we can find a way to remedy it, but we should not spend more energy on one account. Even if this account does well, what will it matter? It is difficult to talk about affecting the overall situation, so what is more important at this time is to prevent such things from happening again.

25. After users search for brand words, this is equivalent to the brand’s private traffic pool, so every piece of content that users can see will affect their consumption decisions. For example, should some big bloggers be placed in the front? Your own brand account is displayed in front? The previous contents all look very bright and beautiful, yes, it’s just a face-saving project.

26. Things like cheating on rankings did exist in the past, but now there is almost no chance of doing so.

27. It is neither a violation nor a restriction for an enterprise account to mention contact information in passive private messages.

28. You must continue to invest in Xiaohongshu. A single month or a single time investment will not be much better than no investment. But should the ten thousand dollars be divided into ten monthly investments? That's not necessary. Too little.

29. If the brand word is not written directly in the body of the note, will it be included? Yes, it will be included, but the probability is indeed very low. A note on Xiaohongshu can be indexed by multiple search terms (as long as it does not violate any regulations; otherwise, there is no question of indexing it). Which search terms will index it depends on the combination and density of keywords.

30. Can I throw French fries directly to the expert? Only MCN agencies can invest on behalf of others.

31. Use corporate accounts to generate private domain traffic. Many brands’ methods are very straightforward to use corporate accounts for advertising, but I’m still wondering why no one adds me on WeChat? The era when you could just write down your contact information and someone would add you is long gone. Now there are more suppliers and the information has become more transparent. For any service, you can find a lot of providers by searching on the Internet. Users can choose to find you or others. If they are not attractive, they will not find you, which is very reasonable. So now we not only need to provide contact information, but also make the content attractive.

32. Some brands believe that promoting products provides a more realistic usage scenario for the product, so it can be more effective. I will not comment on whether this is right or not, but I will provide it for your reference.

33. The function of an enterprise account is to display your brand’s official updates, product descriptions, etc. It has tried its best. I understand that brands want to do the biggest thing with the least amount of money, but don't start by saying you want to create an IP. That's not very practical. There are many Blue Vs on Weibo, but there is only one Durex.

34. Is it necessary to invest in information flow? We cannot simply say whether it is necessary or not. Tools are meant to be used, and of course they must be used reasonably. When you have accumulated a lot of brand content, it will be useful to invest in information flow. Nowadays, there is very little content that can be converted into purchases with just a note or an advertisement, otherwise there would be no need for people to come to Xiaohongshu to promote products.

35. Currently, ordinary Xiaohongshu bloggers can post Taobao links, even if they are not registered notes. However, the products must be from Taobao stores and on the following channels: Fliggy, Jiyoujia and ifashio.

36. Everyone always says that they can’t find customer service on Xiaohongshu, but it’s quite fast to find customer service on Enterprise Account. The manual access in the lower right corner of the Enterprise Account backend is very fast, but the response is relatively slow.

That’s about it for today. Although there is actually a lot more that can be written about brand operations, most of them cannot be explained in one sentence because there are too many factors involved, such as the brand’s budget, the company’s strategy, etc.