Xiaohongshu community operation strategy!

Did you think Xiaohongshu was a gathering place for rich and beautiful women who showed off their beauty makeup and luxury cars? Then you may not have kept up with Xiaohongshu. If you spend some time browsing Xiaohongshu, you will find that the content of this platform, which is labeled as a "grass-planting" community by the outside world, has become more diverse:

• Animal Crossing players research flower hybridization on Xiaohongshu;
• Kitchen Enthusiasts Collection Recipe Tutorials;
• Job seekers can refer to the interview experience of HR in large companies, and postgraduate candidates can have their senior students give them guidance;
• There are also a large number of reading notes and English learning experience sharing on the platform.

Yes, Xiaohongshu seems to have changed.

Henry, who started operating a Xiaohongshu account in February this year, has gained nearly 100,000 followers on the platform in two months. Different from Xiaohongshu’s previous labels, Henry mostly shares interpretations of business books, consulting company experience, and vlogs about his entrepreneurship and life on Xiaohongshu. In short, the content he produces is more about "industry" than "fashion."

The Xiaohongshu homepage and video content of "Henry Tongxiyu"

Among the content created by Henry, the video "Sharing Consulting Experience: How to Quickly Understand a New Industry", which has a high professional threshold, has received more than 2,000 likes and collections. Users expressed their preference for this type of content in their comments: the top comment hoped that Henry would share more similar useful information, and many people "highlighted the key points" in the comment area.

Herny's experience is representative of Xiaohongshu's rapid expansion of vertical content on the platform. At present, continuing the content support plan from half a year ago, the quantity and influence of financial, technological, music, game and other content on the Xiaohongshu platform are gradually increasing.

The multi-vertical layout conveys Xiaohongshu’s ambition: to tear off the labels and create a lifestyle platform with rich dimensions. In the process of moving towards the goal, supporting different types of creators and content forms based on the community foundation is an important part.

The attraction of Xiaohongshu

In the fiercely competitive content track, how to attract more high-quality content creators to Xiaohongshu and provide them with a healthy growth environment? At the Creator Cloud Open Day held on April 23, Xiaohongshu demonstrated the platform's basic thinking and implementation path on the content ecosystem.

From public information, it can be seen that Xiaohongshu’s vision for the platform’s content ecology can be summarized in three keywords: vertical categories, videos and live broadcasts.

The so-called vertical categories mean that in addition to traditional advantageous fields such as beauty, fashion, etc., Xiaohongshu will focus on the two directions of pan-entertainment and pan-knowledge. Among them, pan-entertainment includes film and television, music, dance, and games; pan-knowledge includes finance, technology, education, and reading. Video and live streaming are two content forms that are focused on.

The expansion of content dimensions and content forms together constitute Xiaohongshu’s basic conception of the platform’s content ecology. Based on the goal, one of Xiaohongshu’s implementation paths is to provide traffic support.

Jess, the person in charge of Xiaohongshu's creative account, said that they will launch a "10 billion traffic upward plan" to focus on providing targeted support to video creators, live broadcast creators, and creators of general knowledge and general entertainment categories.

Specific strategies include:

• 5 billion traffic will be allocated to video creators, that is, creators with a higher proportion of video notes will receive greater support;
• 2 billion traffic is allocated to creators of general knowledge (finance, technology, education, reading) and general entertainment (film, television, music, dance, games);
• 3 billion traffic is given to live broadcast hosts.

In addition, for vertical content, in addition to traffic inclination, Xiaohongshu will also introduce 1,000 high-quality creators in vertical fields to provide exclusive planning, IP customization and other services.

At a time when dividends are disappearing and traffic is valuable, Xiaohongshu's support for traffic is enough to reflect its emphasis and determination on expanding the platform's content ecology. Xiaohongshu, which has already established its own position in the fields of beauty and fashion, has taken the initiative to attack and take on more vertical categories. The reason is nothing more than wanting to make the pie bigger. To a certain extent, this is also the direction guided by user demand.

Jess told "Shen Xiang" that Xiaohongshu hopes to develop into a more diversified platform and needs new content to meet the new demands brought about by user growth. The interaction between general knowledge and general entertainment content is active. The platform hopes to guide more creators through the community to publish content in categories where they have not yet established a strong advantage.

Xiaohongshu did not start to change recently.

In fact, the creator support plan released this time is a continuation of the "123 Plan" launched in November 2019. Last November, Xiaohongshu announced the "Creator 123 Plan" at its first Creator Open Day. "123" refers to:

• A creator center (data analysis and backend operation management tools for creators);
• We provide guidance to creators on operations by holding two types of activities: open classes and listening sessions;
• Three platform products: brand cooperation platform, product recommendation platform, and interactive live broadcast platform, providing creators with more monetization channels.

At that time, Xiaohongshu’s public goal was to “have 100,000 creators with over 10,000 fans” and “have 10,000 creators with over 10,000 monthly income” by 2020.

It is not difficult to review the logic behind Xiaohongshu from the setting of strategies and goals: attract more creators to join through platform operation support, and attract high-quality creators to stay by establishing a healthy reward mechanism, thus establishing a virtuous circle.

Judging from the data released at the recent Creator Cloud Open Day, the “123 Plan” has been quite effective. According to Jess, as products such as interactive live streaming, product recommendations, and brand collaborations have been launched online for internal testing, the number of creators on Xiaohongshu with over 10,000 fans has increased by 155%.

Specifically, in the past six months, the number of entertainment and food notes posted on the platform has increased by 600%. Entertainment, food and daily life became the top three most popular video categories among users, and the consumption of sports events and technology and digital products also increased by 408% and 279% respectively.

The more core change lies in the adjustment of the path for creators to monetize their influence.

Kankan, founder of MCN agency Zhaixingge, told "Shen Xiang" that after the brand cooperation platform was launched, the ordering process for the agency to connect with brands became transparent and systematic, freeing up a lot of time for handling tedious matters. Compared with the past, agencies have more opportunities to face brands directly and can secure more cooperation opportunities for bloggers - this will undoubtedly increase the enthusiasm of content creators.

Precisely because of the effectiveness of the "123 Plan", Xiaohongshu launched the "10 Billion Traffic Upward Plan" half a year later, directly exchanging traffic for speed.

However, if we go back to Xiaohongshu’s original intention of supporting content creators, everything it does today still cannot be separated from the word “community”.

All for the community

"Community" has always been Xiaohongshu's core competitiveness.

Xiaohongshu, which started out as a platform for sharing overseas shopping products, accumulated a group of seed users who were keen on fashion in its early days, thus setting the tone for the "grass-planting" community; in 2017, Xiaohongshu achieved rapid growth through celebrity operation strategies; since then, Xiaohongshu has extended the platform content to a broader "eating, drinking and having fun" lifestyle direction, trying to enrich the community ecology.

During its development, user interactions on Xiaohongshu and user-generated content have become the two major barriers of Xiaohongshu, one indicating the community stickiness of Xiaohongshu, and the other indicating the vitality of Xiaohongshu's UGC community.

According to "LatePost", at the Xiaohongshu strategic meeting in early 2020, senior management set the number of posts as the most important indicator in OKR - the emphasis on users posting notes is to further strengthen the community's attributes.

The greatest value of a high-quality community lies in its self-growth ability. That is, once the community ecosystem is formed, its self-circulating energy will drive the continuous expansion of the platform's scale and influence.

Thanks to the unique community attributes of the platform, Xiaohongshu has been on the fast track of growth in the past two years. With its original categories already refined and expanded, it is only logical for it to expand into more areas. The continuous increase in creators and the launch of platform products represented by live streaming are all continuations of this logic.

Currently, live streaming has become the focus of the Internet world. Xiaohongshu, which started internal testing of live streaming at the end of last year, has also sparked heated discussions. How Xiaohongshu, which has a unique community atmosphere, will do live streaming has always been the focus of outside attention. Not long ago, LV made its first live streaming show on Xiaohongshu. There are more and more discussions about how Xiaohongshu can break out of the red ocean of live streaming.

Xiaohongshu is trying to take a differentiated route in terms of how to combine the product form of live streaming with the community advantages of Xiaohongshu to create a better chemical reaction. This can be understood by a metaphor: the common e-commerce live streaming is a direct sales model, where users go "cloud shopping" under the guidance of the anchor, and the live streaming room is more like a "shopping mall" with a full range of goods. However, in the community logic of Xiaohongshu, the live streaming room is closer to the creator's "living room."

Compared to shopping malls, the living room is a more relaxed and intimate communication scene. The relationship between creators and fans is more like a host inviting friends to his home, sharing good things and experiences during the chat. In other words, under Xiaohongshu's live broadcast model, the two-way interaction between creators and fans is closer. With the help of live streaming, creators can gain better fan stickiness and trust, and fans can also get "grass-planting" recommendations that are more in line with their needs.

Generally speaking, "selling goods" is not the most important indicator of Xiaohongshu's live broadcast. The contribution of live broadcast to the platform content and the stickiness of creators' fans is the important consideration dimension.

Kankan revealed to "Shen Xiang" that the current broadcast rate of Zhaixingge has exceeded 60% of the total number of people. The blogger can clearly feel that the live broadcast has consolidated the stickiness of existing fans and improved the interaction with notes. Henry feels the same way. Through live streaming, he has established a closer connection with his fans. "Live streaming is a very in-depth fan interaction scenario. It allows users to get to know me more completely and also allows me to get to know many fans."

However, organizations and creators are still exploring the live streaming format of Xiaohongshu.

Jess’s introduction to Xiaohongshu’s live broadcast operation strategy can provide clues to answer the above phenomenon. Jess believes that most of the live broadcasts on the platform are currently interactive, and the platform does not interfere with bloggers’ choice of live broadcast method. Xiaohongshu pays more attention to the live broadcast’s interaction rate, online time and data on whether fans will watch it next time.

“GMV is not the core indicator of Xiaohongshu live streaming, but the number of creators suitable for community live streaming is. Bringing goods is the result brought about by live streaming, which is rooted in the sharing attribute of the community, rather than the purpose.”

It can be seen that in Xiaohongshu's strategic map, the investment in live streaming is based on the two premises of community and content. In essence, it is to create good content first, stimulate the development of the community ecology, and then consider commercialization strategies, rather than the other way around, killing the chicken to get the eggs.

In other words, even for live streaming, which is always believed by the outside world to have the ability to be commercialized, Xiaohongshu's expectation is to continue to deepen the community.

For Xiaohongshu, which already has 100 million monthly active users, the community has been its foundation and its real moat from the very beginning. Increasing the number of creators will help the ecosystem become diverse and organic, and live streaming is a way and path to achieve the goal.

Compared with the approach of seizing the opportunity and pursuing live streaming monetization based on platform traffic more quickly, Xiaohongshu's strategy will be more circuitous in commercialization. This is a more restrained strategic choice and also a long-term approach of adhering to healthy growth in order to get a bigger piece of the pie.

Author: Deep Sound

Source: Deep Sound