"planting grass" is not as good as "watching grass": The core value of Xiaohongshu is not "planting grass", because each platform (Taobao/ Weibo /Dianping/Douyin) is enriching its own content and improving its distribution mechanism To attract users, Xiaohongshu is only one of them; and its real value lies in the detailed comparison within the platform after "planting grass", that is, "looking at grass"; 60% of user behavior is "searching" within the platform rather than "Walking around", users call it "Beautiful Xiaozhihu";
•Moat built by pictures and texts: Comparing various platforms, only Xiaohongshu has a "large amount" of "text + picture" content for users to search and compare carefully; and Taobao reviews are short, public accounts are too professional, Weibo information is mixed, short videos are difficult to search and are inefficient in comparison. Xiaohongshu’s high-quality posts and community-like atmosphere accumulated in the past are its moat;
•Content>Amateur>KOL>Celebrities: Xiaohongshu users don’t pay much attention to bloggers. They care more about “what is written” rather than “who writes it.” Among bloggers, users prefer amateurs because they think their posts are more authentic and credible. Internet celebrities will speak insincerely. ads, but basically don’t care about celebrities;
•The acceptance of advertising soft articles is actually very high: Although 40% of users feel that there are many advertising soft articles in Xiaohongshu, because there are not so many high-quality evaluation articles on other platforms, they have no ability to distinguish advertisements. ability, so users are very receptive to platform advertising soft articles, and the more frequent users are, the more they recognize the value of the platform and feel that advertising does not matter;
• Don’t think about “pulling weeds” for the time being: mature Xiaohongshu users are on the platform The purchasing habit has not yet been established, and the reputation of fake products is the main reason for many users to quit.
Xiaohongshu has become the first choice and must-have app for exquisite girls. According to public information, Xiaohongshu currently has 85 million monthly active users, about 20-25 million daily active users, and 3 billion notes exposed daily, of which UGC content contributes 70% of the exposure.
Little fairies can learn beauty makeup and skin care, and see through and match accessories. Not only that, when traveling, the editor opened Ctrip and carefully selected a high-end hotel that looked magnificent, and found that the living experience was no different from Home Inns; while the editor’s leader found a hotel with excellent value for money on Xiaohongshu. In the Internet celebrity B&B, we could enjoy the wind, chat, drink some wine and swim under the stars, and finally experienced the feeling of a sweet twosome. Fitness, weddings, home decoration, mother and baby, any topic that little fairies want to pay attention to can be found in the diaries written by young ladies who are willing to share, which are detailed and detailed.
However, this 6-year-old company currently faces many challenges. The development of e-commerce is slow. The platform has raised the entry threshold for MCN, resulting in the loss of a large number of KOLs. At the same time, there are more and more trolls, which affects the user experience but the company does not benefit from it.
ZP surveyed 500 Xiaohongshu users and conducted in-depth interviews with 50 of their friends, trying to understand whether the little sisters (and brothers) recognized the company that was changing and were willing to accompany Xiaohongshu to continue to grow.
Little Red Book for Young and Respectable Women
The users of Little Red Book are still mainly women, and they are generally younger. According to ZP research, about 3/4 of users are women, mainly aged 20-35, accounting for about 90%, of which 2/3 are unmarried.
Xiaohongshu user portrait
Typical Xiaohongshu female users have a certain pursuit of quality of life, love beauty and know how to dress up, and like to learn knowledge to enrich themselves - "talented and beautiful" may be the best description of these little fairies.
The main content types of users browsing Xiaohongshu.
Users in fourth-tier cities pay more attention to maternal and infant and medical beauty than first- and second-tier cities.
Outline the portrait of Xiaohongshu users. Let’s discuss where the ceiling of target users is. .
There are about 350 million people aged 20-35 in the country (based on the number of births, the data comes from the Bureau of Statistics). We expand the scope to a wider range, 18-39 years old (birth age 1980 to 2001, assuming that all those born in the 1980s are young The audience of Red Book (the penetration rate of Xiaohongshu is relatively low when people are not in college) is about 470 million people. If the male-to-female ratio is 1:1 (actually slightly higher for men), then the population of both men and women under the wide caliber is about 235 million.
The number of female users of Xiaohongshu will be much smaller than the above number, because in terms of age, Xiaohongshu has a high penetration rate among young women, and users over 35 years old actually use it less. ZP found that mainstream women are already married at this time After giving birth to a child and the child is older, mothers' attention to beauty is sometimes distracted due to the pressure of life.
More importantly, income level is the primary reason that restricts many people from using Xiaohongshu, and income level is directly related to China’s urbanization process.
ZP found that the average personal monthly income of Xiaohongshu users is about 5,000 yuan, but in fact only about 30% of the population has a personal monthly income of 5,000 yuan or more (CNNIC: The 43rd Statistical Report on China’s Internet Development in 2019 ), not to mention that the proportion of young people earning 5,000 yuan per month may be even lower.
CNNIC statistics on the income of Internet users in China
Judging from the level of urbanization development, among the 470 million people from 1980 to 2001, the urban population accounted for less than 30%. Xiaohongshu is considered a gathering place for fashion. Fashion is by no means exclusive to urban people, but we have to admit that the differences in income and education (affecting cognition) between urban and rural areas have blocked some users out.
Urban and rural birth population from 1980 to 2001
Population of births estimated by urbanization rate
Several female users who have temporarily given up on Xiaohongshu said that "recently running out of money" was the main reason for reducing their use of Xiaohongshu. After all, this platform has strong consumerist attributes, and it is difficult to swim openly in this material world without some rice.
Therefore, under the dual restrictions of age and income, ZP estimates that the small target of female users of Xiaohongshu is 100 million+, and it may be difficult to break through 200 million. Xiaohongshu still has unreached female users in fourth-tier and below cities, which is the source of the company's short- and medium-term user growth.
A large number of Xiaohongshu users in fourth-tier and below cities have only downloaded Xiaohongshu for one year.
There are not many young women who do not use Xiaohongshu. If you want to expand your circle of male users, it is actually a better choice. The media reported that the overall growth of technological and digital content on Xiaohongshu in the first half of 2019 was 11.4 times. However, according to ZP research, male users seem to be less interested in technological and digital content on Xiaohongshu. They pay more attention to sports, fitness, Contents such as hairstyle and outfit. These contents are also the focus of fashion shoe and fashion clothing platforms such as Duhenic.
Although China has 230 million adult men born after 1980, first of all, the penetration rate of Xiaohongshu among those born in the 1980s is very low, and they are generally not interested in this app because they seem to have fixed themselves on "simple" clothing style, but the attention of those born in 1995 and 2000 has increased sharply; secondly, boys are still very "steel" in general. They will watch Hupu and Zhihu, but Xiaohongshu's current feminine tone is not suitable for them. doesn't seem very attractive.
But the above is only the current user limit. In the future, as urbanization continues to advance, girls will have more money and boys will love beauty more, so the long-term user base of Xiaohongshu will continue to increase over time.
"Growing grass" is not as good as "looking at grass"
People have the impression that Xiaohongshu is a platform for discovering good things, but ZP found that the behavior of "planting grass" certainly exists, but it is not the core value of Xiaohongshu. The core value of this platform is "looking at grass".
Planting grass is the main function of Xiaohongshu, but a similar proportion of users
tend to plant grass elsewhere and then compare it in Xiaohongshu
For Xiaohongshu users, in addition to the Xiaohongshu app, Taobao and other e-commerce platforms Beauty bloggers/travel bloggers in places such as , word-of-mouth from friends, and Weibo are also important bases for planting. Nowadays, every platform is catering to thousands of people, they have introduced short videos, and they are strengthening the "Amway" function in the app. For users, there are many channels for planting grass. Users told ZP that they are planting grass on Xiaohongshu. Attention is constantly being diverted. There are a lot of store tour videos popping up on Douyin, and Dianping’s homepage is now doing the same thing as Little Red Book, and it’s very beautiful to watch.
Both Douyin and Dianping have good recommendation functions
There are many channels for discovering good things
Douban is particularly prominent among female users
ZP found that typical users use Xiaohongshu 3-4 times a week. When using Xiaohongshu, the purpose It’s very personal. It’s usually “what you buy and shop around” rather than “what you shop around and buy.” Once you have the products you want to buy, you can search on Xiaohongshu and treat it as a “beauty guide” and a “life review”. ". Generally, high-frequency users (who account for a small proportion and usually have a higher income level) will browse randomly.
Users use Xiaohongshu for a very purposeful purpose, with the "tool" attribute
Overall, users' use of Xiaohongshu shows a clear "on-demand use" - new clothes change seasons, and you want to buy a new one. If you have run out of lipstick or facial cream and want to replace it, or if you want to take annual leave to travel, renovate a house, prepare for pregnancy/birth, or want to have medical beauty treatments, you can open Xiaohongshu to search.
Xiaohongshu may not be the only base for growing grass, but it is the most high-quality, efficient and irreplaceable place for "looking at grass". Everyone thinks that Taobao does not have in-depth reviews, the information on Weibo is too confusing, Douyin/Bilibili videos are inconvenient to search and compare, and Douban has more questions and exchanges but less detailed reviews. Only Xiaohongshu can satisfy them in detailed comparisons in a short time. needs.
At least for now, the in-depth and thoughtful "Little Red Book" graphic and text evaluation is a moat that is difficult for any company to shake in the short term.
As for Xiaohongshu, it is also generalizing the content and introducing some entertainment-oriented content, but the feedback from users is very average, because mainstream users do not regard it as an "entertainment platform" but an "in-depth evaluation base". Just go to Douyin Kuaishou for Tugele, but those eye-catching contents actually cause discomfort to users.
Screenshots from users
"What said" is more important than "who said it"
Xiaohongshu is committed to inviting celebrities to join, hoping to attract more users through the celebrity's traffic, and also rely on the celebrity's credibility to enhance trust in the platform. Of course, there was also the lovely Mr. Lei who came uninvited to promote his new camera phone CC9.
Mr. Lei, who comes with his own BGM, promotes the new mobile phone
. In order to win-win with KOLs and provide users with high-quality content, Xiaohongshu supports top Internet celebrities on the one hand, and regulates the MCNs that are squandering money on the platform. According to media reports, if an MCN organization engages in behaviors such as "receiving orders privately without going through the Xiaohongshu brand partner platform", "falsifying the partnership with bloggers" and "falsifying data" during the cooperation period, the deposit will be deducted and the Termination of cooperation for one year. For "private orders", the deposit of 200,000 will be directly deducted.
Big influencers such as celebrities and Internet celebrities are regarded as core assets by the company. Do users think so? A survey by
ZP shows that about 20% of users tend to read content from Internet celebrities, while twice as many users tend to read posts from amateurs. 40% of users believe that it doesn’t matter who posts it, as long as the content is good.
As for celebrities, not many people mention them. Fan Bingbing and Ouyang Nana are also having a successful time on Xiaohongshu, but except for a few celebrities who are very active, most celebrities have no problem in terms of fan count (Angelababy Xiaohongshu fans 1.91 million vs. Weibo 100 million), number of posts ( Fan Bingbing has only about 70 notes) or the content she posts (recommending products on Xiaohongshu vs. posting news/interesting things on Weibo/Douyin) is not very eye-catching.
Amateurs’ attention is actually higher than that of big V
users told ZP in an in-depth interview that they come to Xiaohongshu “to read the content”, as long as the content is written in detail and thoughtfully, regardless of whether the author is famous or not. They believe that amateurs tend to be more attentive, and when amateurs become Internet celebrities and start accepting advertisements, the quality of their posts drops significantly at that time.
"(Whose content do you like to watch?) I read more miscellaneous things. I don’t pay too much attention to the number of fans. I focus on the content. I don’t mind the number of likes. This is all important. I have added a lot of people, but I just feel that His posts are easy to follow. "
" Maybe you don't want to read them after the number of fans increases, because most of them are arranged by the company, and there are many advertisements. Mainly because I felt this way when I browsed Weibo. , I feel that the same must be true in Xiaohongshu."
" is the kind of person who likes to keep his true feelings. Sometimes you will see others talking about the changes in the mentality of a small transparent person who became a big V. Generally speaking, he prefers people with a small number of fans, ranging from a few hundred to two or three thousand, usually below. Ask any questions and she will answer them. ”
Perhaps for fame or for sharing, authors who write diaries carefully and carefully are always more likely to win the favor of users. The influence of Internet celebrity Vs selling goods must be far greater than that of these amateurs, but compared with e-commerce sales (recommended products), users recognize the platform’s information value (tutorials/effects) more, and genuine and thoughtful posts are often written by amateurs (or professional institutions with pixelated writing skills).
Users attach less importance to brand recommendations than expected. The proportion of
in tutorials/effects is higher than expected. These are often
coded by amateurs. From this point of view, the platform only protects those creators whose big Vs on the head hit the waist and tail, and the possible impact is greater than losing a few stars. It’s a big deal, because it destroys the confidence of many bloggers who are truly dedicated to their creations, and the sincere reviews they contribute are the key to supporting the platform.
It doesn’t matter if there are too many ads on Xiaohongshu! , some people think that short video platforms such as Douyin are gaining momentum, so they are worried that Xiaohongshu users will be lost - there is no need to worry at this stage.
ZP research found that the frequency of users using Xiaohongshu is still on a significant upward trend. Among them, the growth is more obvious in fourth-tier cities and below. Richer content (starting from beauty and skin care and extending to all aspects of life, but not entertainment) and more carefully written posts are the more users use Xiaohongshu. The primary reason for the increase is
The frequency of use of Xiaohongshu is still increasing
It is especially obvious in fourth-tier cities
The increase in advertising is indeed the reason for the loss of some users, but it only accounts for 8% of all users, which is not as high as the recent changes ( mei) is busy (qian).
The main reason why users reduce the use of Xiaohongshu
As the number of soft articles on the platform continues to increase (40% of users said that there are many soft articles promoted), users’ ability to identify soft articles has also increased. Gradually, I gradually understand the routines of soft articles. The vast majority of users (80% in in-depth interviews) can easily identify hydrology from exaggerated descriptions, dazzling symbolic expressions, overly positive attitudes, and obvious inflating.
feels that there are not many users with many advertisements.
"You can tell what an advertisement is by looking at the style of the article, the uniformity of announcements, many exclamation points, or lengthy articles, and many emoticons. advertise. "
" has found a lot of soft articles, in which bloggers praise a certain brand to the fullest. It is relatively easy to distinguish. For example, when he recommended a bunch of noble brands, he talked about a Chinese brand whose name he had never heard of, or When promoting a brand, you only talk about the good stuff and not the bad stuff. Generally speaking, relatively internet-famous and relatively new brands or products have a lot of soft articles, while brands that are not so internet-famous may not necessarily have soft articles. "
What is worthy of recognition is that the higher the frequency of users, the higher the acceptance of advertisements. In the eyes of fans, the flaws of advertising soft articles are not hidden, and there are still many good-looking posts that can be mined.
The higher the frequency of users, the higher the acceptance of advertisements. The more tolerant
“Sometimes I only realize it’s an advertisement after reading the entire article. For example, when I was talking about hair styles, I only found out at the end that there was an advertisement for a hair mask, something about styling. Now I think the advertisement is acceptable. I just learned something from the first part and I won’t buy the second one anyway. "
" There are some unfiltered soft articles about real color testing that are acceptable, and I just want to see what the real color testing is like. , advertising is acceptable, but the user experience must be real; soft articles may also be planted. "
Advertisements are ubiquitous, but good advertisements are rare. The advantage of vertical platforms lies in the large number of in-depth reviews for users to compare. Compared with other platforms, because Xiaohongshu has accumulated a lot of high-quality content, some amateurs have formed the habit of posting here. Regarding the habit of reviewing articles, it will be difficult for other platforms to surpass Xiaohongshu in terms of quantity and quality of content in the short term, as well as SoYoung and Mafengwo.
Where else can you find such high-quality information, Baidu?
However, you still have to exercise restraint when advertising - the possible impact of too many soft articles is that users’ trust in Xiaohongshu’s “authentic recommendations” will decrease. During the exchange, some ladies told ZP that they are now more inclined to compare on multiple platforms. In addition to Xiaohongshu, they will check beauty products on Weibo, Douban, and Bilibili, and travel on Mafengwo and Fliggy. Go to Soso to avoid seeing a “seller show” instead of a “buyer show” on Xiaohongshu.
E-commerce still seems to have little chance.
Xiaohongshu’s advertising prospects seem bright. How is the current performance of e-commerce after operating for many years? ZP found that it is still not optimistic.
About one-third of the surveyed users (relatively high-frequency users of Xiaohongshu) said they had made purchases on Xiaohongshu in the past six months. Nearly 40% of users have never purchased anything on the platform, while 30% have purchased before but will no longer shop on Xiaohongshu.
Shopping behavior on Xiaohongshu in the past six months
The negative reports of fake products have dissuaded many users, but this is by no means groundless, and some users have actually bought fake products. At the same time, people are often too accustomed to using e-commerce websites such as Taobao , Tmall , etc. There are many and trustworthy products, and there are several big sales every year. There is really no need to gamble on other shopping platforms.
Counterfeit goods and habits from other channels account for the majority.
“Everyone thinks that Xiaohongshu sells fake goods, and most people around me think so. I am also afraid of buying fake goods.”
“I am afraid of fake goods. I have read it in the news. What’s interesting is that the proportion of boys and users in fourth- and lower-tier cities who have made purchases on Xiaohongshu in the past six months is higher than average, while girls in first- and second-tier cities are very cautious.
Boys and users in fourth-tier and below cities are more willing to shop on Xiaohongshu
For some users who have overseas shopping needs, it stands to reason that Xiaohongshu, which started as a cross-border e-commerce company, has an advantage, but in fact everyone has given it a try I found that the purchasing agent from Little Sisters is reliable. Users in first- and second-tier cities will ask their friends to buy at airport duty-free shops when they go abroad, while users in third- and fourth-tier cities rely more on micro-business in their circle of friends.
Even if users buy on Xiaohongshu, the products they buy are often not as high-end as expected. Users with high income levels do not shop on Xiaohongshu, while users with lower income levels buy more hot-selling lipsticks and facial masks with low ASP on Xiaohongshu.
One of Xiaohongshu’s top products 3CE
Gao Yi Asset Mr. Qiu once mentioned that the essence of retail is price and efficiency, and only after passing the "trust" level can players be qualified to compete for price over efficiency, otherwise you will even steal customers. If you don’t come, you can’t stay.
Jingdong Suning 's trust comes from the platform's self-operation, Tmall's trust comes from the official brand presence, Taobao's trust comes from the store ratings and sales volume left by buyers after voting with money, Pinduoduo's 's trust comes from advertising and gradually Improved product quality. For Xiaohongshu, the credibility of the self-operated platform has not yet been established. It is difficult to judge the credibility of third-party stores without diamonds and crowns, so savvy users just don’t buy it.
If buying from a big brand (Tmall has a flagship store), people are usually attracted by the price. At this time, users have to weigh the risk and reward of buying on Xiaohongshu. If you buy a non-famous brand, it depends on how much you trust the review posts.
Xiaohongshu users’ trust in the platform’s self-operated and non-self-operated products
(Original by ZPartners (ID: gh_3a7de06f412b), original title: We surveyed 500 Xiaohongshu users and found that amateurs are more trustworthy than Internet celebrities)
