How to quickly increase followers on Xiaohongshu?

Today I want to talk about a hot topic, as the title suggests: How to quickly increase followers on Xiaohongshu?

I believe this question is what 99% of new bloggers and brands will ask, why newbies?

Because veterans all know that the kind of things you "want" in your mind, such as increasing followers violently and quickly, or increasing followers without doing anything, these fancy operations do not exist on Xiaohongshu.

So, I have to tell you clearly at the beginning that if you expect to increase your followers rapidly after reading this article or if you think you can increase your followers quickly even if the content is not good after reading the article, then you'd better not read on. The longer you read, the more time you waste.

Because I always believe that there is no shortcut to increase followers, but on the premise that the content is good, there are indeed some "skills" to speak of, and what we are going to talk about today are the skills.

01 Formula for increasing followers

If you divide your abilities into two types, you can be a blogger on Xiaohongshu:

Operation: Be familiar with platform rules, account positioning, publishing rhythm, topic selection, etc.

Content: shooting, editing, scripting, etc.

It is obvious that the increase in followers is mainly borne by the operations department.

Operations require methods and data, so in the eyes of an operator, the increase in Xiaohongshu's followers can be calculated using a formula.

The formula is:

Number of fans = traffic * fan conversion rate

Let's do a simple calculation. If there are 1,000 people visiting Xiaohongshu's homepage and the fan conversion rate is 10%, then it is equivalent to an increase of 100 fans.

So you should understand that if you want to increase your followers, you can start from two aspects.

1. Increase your traffic on Xiaohongshu

2. Improve fan conversion rate

As long as any of these two points improves, it means that the absolute value of fan growth will increase.

For example:

Assuming that traffic is increased but fan conversion rate is not, the actual number of fans increased is: 2000*10%=200

Assuming that the fan conversion rate is increased without increasing traffic, the actual number of fans increased is: 1000*20%=200

So improving any point can help you gain followers faster, but what do you want to say? What if these two points are improved at the same time?

Isn’t it absolutely perfect? Improving just one point can be called rapid follower growth. Improving both points at the same time, isn’t this what we call super-rapid follower growth?

So the question is, how to improve these two points?

02 Fan Conversion Path

To increase traffic and conversion rate, you must first figure out how a user follows a blogger.

By breaking down each link in the middle into details and optimizing them separately or focusing on them, these two points can be effectively improved.

(ppt written in 2020)

As shown in the picture above, we have sorted out the process in 3 steps.

1. Xiaohongshu users see notes through search results or feeds, find the notes interesting, and then go to the note page.

2. At this time, if the note is good, the user will want to follow it and go to the personal homepage or directly click to follow.

Of course, most users will still go to their personal homepage first.

3. After entering the homepage, read some notes and finally decide whether to follow it.

These three steps can be made into the following funnel model.

Without keeping you in suspense, the next step is to understand the essence of these three steps and make optimizations.

03 Collection/Hot Articles

Solve the first problem first

1. Xiaohongshu users see notes through search results or feeds, find the notes interesting, and then go to the note page.

The essence of this sentence is to increase the possibility of notes being seen by users. In other words, it is to enhance the little eyes of notes.

This is divided into search traffic and feed flow traffic.

Search traffic means that your notes can be searched. For example, when you search for outfits on Xiaohongshu, your notes can be seen.

Can it be searched? In Xiaohongshu, it is called: "Included".

This method has been written many times and is very comprehensive.

The second is feed flow traffic. Feed is the recommendation page of Xiaohongshu. The notes we see on the recommendation page every day can be called this.

But how can we make notes recommend more?

The simplest way is to pay, such as buying French fries. By paying for traffic, you can easily amplify the exposure of your notes.

But this is undoubtedly a bit expensive... and the rich people's way of playing is not sustainable.

What are the free ways to play? That would be a viral article.

We all know that in addition to generating a lot of interactions, a popular article will also generate quite a lot of likes. For example, some popular articles may have 10,000 likes, but the number of likes may have reached 200,000.

So if there is a popular article, then the problem of small eyes can be solved.

Some students will definitely say, who doesn’t know about the popular article? Can a popular article be published just as you want? Doesn't that depend on luck?

Indeed, the probability of a hit article is extremely low, but it does not depend entirely on luck, and the increase in followers does not entirely depend on hit articles. We just say that hit articles can quickly increase traffic and bring more possibilities for fan conversion.

Therefore, even if there is no hit article, it does not mean that the number of followers will not increase, but the increase in followers is in a normal state.

How to understand?

That is, a daily blogger may only produce 4 explosive articles in a month, and the other notes are daily notes. Assuming that the fan conversion rate is constant and the daily increase in fans is 1,000, then when there is a explosive article, the number of fans may increase by 8,000 a day.

This is not called luck, it is just the normal development law of bloggers, so there is no need to force a popular article, but we must also try our best.

I think following hot topics is the easiest way to produce explosive articles, but following hot topics also requires attention to timing and coordination issues.

In this paragraph, we only need to know that amplifying traffic can bring about an increase in fans, and several methods of amplifying traffic have been mentioned in this paragraph.

At the same time, we also solved the problem of traffic in the formula: number of fans = traffic * fan conversion rate.

But I personally think that traffic is always limited, and we should make the best use of the limited traffic, that is, to improve the fan conversion rate.

04 Character setting (differentiation)

Now let’s solve the second problem.

2. At this time, if the note is good, the user will want to follow it and go to the personal homepage or directly click to follow.

Simply put, users read the notes and think they are okay, so they feel the urge to pay attention to them.

So how can we make users want to pay attention to the notes after reading them?

Let’s think about this: what is the significance of paying attention to representatives? Why should users follow someone?

I just want to continue to receive your updates and see your updates more timely.

So some people say that it must be because the content is good enough that people will have the urge to pay attention.

But don’t you think this is a bit too general?

Assuming that we assume that all content matches user needs, if a blogger posts a text-only announcement about the Shanghai epidemic, would that be considered good content?

Of course it does. The content is quite useful to users and can even become a hit.

But unfortunately, this kind of content does not make people want to pay attention, because this type of content is OK "in itself", but why should I follow this blogger? Do I want to receive her updates in a timely manner?

Similarly, for example, there are many bloggers who share knowledge on Xiaohongshu.

I picked one at random as an example. You can see that this type of blogger has posted a lot of "dry goods" content. Let's not discuss how these contents came from, but only discuss the content itself. In fact, it seems quite meaningful...

But do I really want to pay attention? What’s the reason for not wanting to pay attention?

The reason is that there is too much content like this on Xiaohongshu, it is everywhere and has no characteristics. Even if I register a new account myself, can I just copy hers? Who can tell who copied whom?

So here we have to understand one thing: good content does not necessarily attract attention.

So what is it that attracts attention? That is differentiation, being different.

I found another blogger who had similar content, but it was expressed in the form of real-life oral narration and with fewer updates, but the number of fans was enough to roughly illustrate the logic. (The expressiveness of the lens and the shooting scene are also very important content forms, but we will ignore them for now)

This is the power of personality. If users think that this article is well-written and interesting, they will be willing to read your next article. This is the impulse of attention. Therefore, personality is also the best way to differentiate.

However, there are naturally more ways to differentiate yourself than just character setting. In order to increase fans in the simplest and most effective way, the effect of appearing directly on camera is the most obvious.

If you don’t quite understand, you are welcome to read this article of mine, which can help you better understand the issues of personality and differentiation.

At this point, we can solve another core problem, which is to make users want to pay attention.

But impulse is impulse after all, how does attention affect whether it is successful?

So this is the last part.

05 Vertical

After optimizing the first two steps of the funnel model, the most important step comes, which is the third problem we encounter.

3. After entering the homepage, read some notes and finally decide whether to follow it.

Simply put, it means converting to fans. After seeing your Xiaohongshu homepage, it determines whether the user will eventually follow you.

Therefore, the homepage becomes particularly important. So what do users see on the blogger’s homepage? What did she want to confirm?

It is nothing more than what we mentioned earlier:

What content will be updated in the future? Is it just as interesting? Are they all similar styles?

If the answer is: yes, then the user will be successfully followed.

If you don’t understand, let me give you an example. This example is easy to give, so I won’t take a screenshot.

For example, if a blogger reposts a popular article from a blogger with a personal identity on another platform, is this good content? Is there differentiated content?

This kind of content even completely meets the expectations of our first two steps and is likely to become a hit.

However, this blogger plagiarizes the content, so he does not always repost the content of the same person. Therefore, the entire account looks like a large patchwork of many different contents.

Will you pay attention to him at this time?

Most likely not, because you know the quality of his work is very poor, he is just copying it, he is not the real person, and you can't even guess whether you will like his next post or not.

So this is the important reason why many accounts have frequent popular articles but the rate of increasing followers is slow. So what can we do to solve this problem?

vertical! vertical! vertical!

Say it to me three times, in addition to the vertical content categories, even the cover must be almost the same.

Why?

Because I want users to feel that what this blogger does is clear at a glance, so as to speed up her following.

So we solved the last step in the formula: Number of fans = traffic * fan conversion rate. This improved the fan attention conversion rate and achieved rapid fan growth.

Believe me, if you solve all the above three problems, the speed of increasing followers can be astonishingly fast.

This is the secret of how Xiaohongshu bloggers quickly increase their followers. I hope you understand it.