Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1340
In one picture, in Beijing in the evening, a fit rider leans over and rides through a hutong by the seaside. The sky is powdered and the clouds are gilded. Across the screen can make people feel a sense of fun. Scroll down a bit, and the accompanying text tells about the best paths for cycling in Beijing and how to choose the best bike for you.
This is the most popular content on Xiaohongshu at present, and it is also a typical Xiaohongshu-style content, sharing light and lively life experiences, with almost no sense of conflict and no curiosity.
Relying on such content, Xiaohongshu has grown into the largest lifestyle community in China, with more than 200 million users sharing and discovering content on the platform every month. It is one of the few platforms in the Internet industry that is still growing at a high speed – in mid-2020, the number of monthly active users of Xiaohongshu is only half of what it is now.
This company, which appears to be a sudden emergence from the outside world, has actually been established for nearly ten years. Such a “late blooming” growth path is similar to that of Bilibili, another online content community. When “growth” has become the core metric pursued by most Internet companies, they accept their slow growth; they also do not have an attempt to “build an empire and compete for territory”, and it seems that they have never experienced Zeng Guofan’s style of “construction”. Fighting a deadly battle”, not fighting a war of attrition with any company on the frontal battlefield.
In 2015, Xiaohongshu did not abandon the community when it was actively deploying cross-border e-commerce; in 2019, it was the first time that Xiaohongshu used money to acquire new users; when short videos swept the content platform, Xiaohongshu did not. From pictures and texts to short videos, when introducing short videos, the team’s mentality is “information supplement”.
Only today, the “peaceful era” of Xiaohongshu has passed. Waves of new users are pouring in, and Xiaohongshu has to work harder to maintain the community’s value attribute of “making it possible for ordinary people to help ordinary people”; Internet companies with a huge user base are also following suit and trying to surpass it , Taobao launched “Shopping”; Douyin established a special project to introduce bloggers on Xiaohongshu, launched graphic content on the main end, and launched the product “Ke Song”. To meet these challenges, Xiaohongshu is more patient than at any time in the past nine years.
Capture “new trends” and “information value”
Today’s Xiaohongshu is like a lifestyle magazine on mobile phones, with pictures, texts and short videos presented in double columns, so people always expect to find new lifestyles and new joys in life in this community.
Camping is typical for Xiaohongshu to catch a new trend. Kappa, the head of the community content, first saw camping content in the parent-child field of Xiaohongshu, “It’s not the particularly high-end and beautiful camping that everyone imagines, but ‘Parents take their children out to lay a picnic cloth, and set up a tent by the river. , go home after dark'”.
Until March 2021, from the data point of view, the publishing volume of this type of content showed a relatively steep upward trend. Camping is more suitable for spring and autumn. March and October are the two nodes where the volume of camping content and the number of users increase significantly. If someone is still publishing camping in winter, they will be considered by the team as very professional authors. Xiaohongshu decided to officially expand such content.
Different from the classification method of content platforms that look more at vertical fields, Xiaohongshu is more like a “forum” in the mobile Internet era, classified according to topic points. The so-called topic point is the content added by the author at the end of each note. The operations, product, and data teams observe changes in the trend of community hot topics every week to output a “candidate set”.
Once it comes to whether the vertical category above a certain topic should be put into operation, the content leader, community leader or even the leader of the company needs to reach a consensus. The frequency of such major decisions is very low, on a quarterly or even annual basis. .
It’s not easy to amass a new content area. First of all, camping is not a mature content category. In the early days, there were not enough users willing to publish such content, and users rarely actively searched for camping content. At this time, the platform cannot directly introduce traditional content producers and MCN agency authors.
The team’s first reaction was to go to camping stores and offline camping bases. Kappa saw that the camping store owners are generally camping enthusiasts. Whether it is for repurchase or for common hobbies, they will run their own WeChat groups, and group members are new authors that Xiaohongshu can pull to publish content. However, these people can’t spend three hours a day cutting videos and shooting, but it is more suitable to guide them to share their fishing rods and photos they took when they were camping. When more people start publishing content, Xiaohongshu will use “topics” to attract users, such as teaching everyone how to choose camping equipment and which camping base is better. “If you shoot a camping Vlog, most people can’t do it,” Kappa said.
The difficulty isn’t just finding people. The motivation of these non-professional content producers is neither money nor traffic. Some people simply think that camping is beautiful, some people are avoiding the attention of acquaintances in WeChat Moments, and some people are sharing the joy of acquiring a skill, such as how to quickly Build a canopy. Once the motivations of publishers are dispersed, it is difficult to increase the amount of content published. The team often observes that a user who posts camping content will not post any related content in the next 7 days, 28 days or half a year. He may go on a trip, and he can become a shop-exploring blogger if he can. The behavior is very jumpy and very non-vertical.
To become a trend, it takes “some magic”, Kappa describes the subjective judgment process of Xiaohongshu’s decision to make a certain content. “It can be understood as imagination.” Camping itself is a relatively broad outdoor scene. The team will further refine this scene through imagination and brainstorming, and evolve into picnics, fishing, hiking, and cycling. Camping is just this series of outdoor scenes. The starting point of the activity.
Kappa said some new trends would be overshadowed if only viewed from a vertical field perspective. For example, all pet-related fields are called pet verticals. This vertical category has the best performance in Xiaohongshu data. “Cats and dogs are especially cute.” But in fact, in life, alternative pets have become a big trend. When the team went to communicate with the authors of the alternative pet content, they realized another popular trend: landscaping, that is, the exotic pet has an environment that simulates a desert or tropical rainforest. At this time, “landscape” will be developed into a new content area by Xiaohongshu. Kappa likened the process of discovering trends “like picking up a bunch of grapes”.
Despite being unpredictable, Xiaohongshu still believes that new trends in offline life scenarios like camping, Lu Chong, and fishing have to be seized all the time, and these changes must be guaranteed to appear on their own platform. Kappa said that as long as the offline life changes, there will be a steady stream of users pouring in. Today may be people who like to camp, and tomorrow may be people who like to ride, but there are always new users pouring in.
By May 2022, the number of users related to camping content in Xiaohongshu has tripled compared to last year. As of National Day, there were more than 4.82 million camping-related notes, up from 1.04 million seven months ago. People’s yearning for a new way of life has also boosted the development of new business formats. According to statistics, there are currently more than 26,000 registered camping companies, and more than 60% of them were established after 2020.
In the first half of this year, affected by the epidemic, many public entertainment venues were closed. Young people, especially employees of Internet companies, began to play Frisbee, and “frisbee” has also become a new topic on Xiaohongshu.
Until 2019, Xiaohongshu relied on such content to drive user growth instead of spending money on advertising. But “life” is a flowing river that doesn’t know where to go. How Xiaohongshu is sensitive enough to sense the coming of the next wave and grasp the subtle changes in “lifestyle” is the biggest challenge after it has become a community.
In addition to “catching the trend”, Kappa concluded that another growth model of Xiaohongshu is “providing information value”, which is often referred to as “altruism” internally, allowing others to get help.
In order to release enough “information value”, the number of “collections” of notes in the Xiaohongshu recommendation algorithm is highly weighted. The number of favorites is an expression of the amount of information. After Xiaohongshu launched short videos in 2020, the weight of videos that convey “useful” information is also higher than that of pan-entertainment videos that kill time. This form of video can supplement the amount of information in some fields, such as automobiles and decoration.
For community content to drive the growth of content publishing, participants, and “mutual aid” behavior, the threshold for user participation must be low enough to allow users to publish content freely. A relatively egalitarian perspective matters.
By default, the boundary between creators and users in Xiaohongshu is not that big. It is collectively referred to as “user operation” internally, there is no “creator operation team”, and no one’s OKRs (assessment goals) mention Wanbo. The number of main fans or top bloggers. The presentation method and traffic distribution of dual-column pages also emphasize equal rights.
At this stage, Xiaohongshu has increasingly acquired new users through advertisement placement and mobile phone pre-installation, but it has not given up the growth model of driving natural inflow of users through “catching trends” and providing “information value”.
For the community, the users who naturally flow in are those with high demand and high purpose, and they are closer to the existing core users of the platform. The results of natural growth are also more suitable as a standard for observing changes in the user structure and status of Xiaohongshu. Kappa revealed that the proportion of male and female users who naturally flow into Xiaohong Lake is the same.
naturally formed community
The form of Xiaohongshu when it was founded was not the same as it is now, which is similar to the beginning of most Internet products.
In 2013, when the third employee Sakuragi was interviewed, Xiaohongshu’s plan was to “may do something related to shopping and tourism”, which is a relatively broad direction. Until 2015, he was the only product manager of Xiaohongshu, and now he is in charge of the overall product and some community business.
At that time, overseas travel was a growing trend. People are accustomed to going to Ctrip to find the most cost-effective machine and wine packages, and then go to Qiongyou and Mafengwo to download the PDF guides for attractions, print or import them into iPads, and then pack them on the road. This year, the director of the National Tourism Administration predicts that the number of Chinese outbound tourists will exceed 100 million for the first time in the following year.
Entrepreneurs have to find a fine enough seam, and then tear open the market according to their appetite. “Machine wine is a fixed cost, but once you start buying things, people start ‘yanghuahua’ (Shanghai dialect: spending money lavishly), and no one teaches you how to buy it,” Sakuragi said. Shopping information became the opening that Xiaohongshu ripped open.
In August, the Xiaohongshu team with less than 6 people spent three weeks to launch seven PDFs of the Xiaohongshu Overseas Shopping Guide that can be downloaded on the computer, the Sakuragi-style version.
Soon, the founding team realized that the PDF update was not timely. The closing time of a store in Hong Kong’s Harbour City was adjusted from 10:00 pm to 9:00 pm, which made a group of users holding guidebooks empty. It took only a month for Xiaohongshu to launch the BBS forum, where users can share shopping-related topics in a way similar to articles on the official account, but the team felt that the speed was not fast enough, so they immediately started to try to be more fragmented. Content. During the Christmas season in December, a mobile application called “Xiaohongshu Hong Kong Shopping Guide” was launched on the Apple Store, and its basic form is almost the same as today’s Xiaohongshu.
Startups that can build products into “communities” have taken the initiative to do some “rejection” actions, and most of these actions have the attractive shell of “higher efficiency growth”.
There are many “shopping guide” platforms that were born at the same time as Xiaohongshu, such as Meilishuo and Mogujie, but these products have long regarded “closing a deal” as the end point of the user experience. The rapid development of an e-commerce company may allow Xiaohongshu, a company with an unclear form, to gain users faster, and the turnover and profit margins will be clearer and more inspiring indicators of the team’s struggle.
Xiaohongshu also has a group of early users with strong spending power. As the company’s only product manager, Sakuragi also managed Xiaohongshu’s WeChat and Weibo accounts at the time. At the end of 2013, the two accounts had 30,000 to 40,000 loyal followers, and the models of the followers could be seen in the background. “These young people take a weekend to go to Hong Kong to experience the discount season, and the cost is not high for them.”
Sakuragi recalled, “I can go to Hong Kong to talk to all the merchants and ask them to list the official discount information in the form we want. This must be more complete and more efficient, but the consumer’s feeling is that friends around me recommend one. Items are more trustworthy and kind than recommended by counter staff.” If the official information of the merchants is gathered early in the morning, Xiaohongshu will be more inclined to the direction of e-commerce. Xiaohongshu didn’t do that.
Since then, the team will think about what the future of Xiaohongshu should look like, “but it is certainly not a website that provides shopping tips for destinations in so many countries around the world.”
Xiaohongshu has not thought about what a “community” is at the moment. “We are just thinking, what kind of information do users want most? What is the most efficient way to transmit information?” They came to the conclusion It is UGC (User Created Content), “Behind the product should be a collection of people, not a collection of official information”.
The next year, the PDF of Xiaohongshu stopped at the 8th copy, and the app name was shortened from “Hong Kong Shopping Guide” to “Xiaohongshu”.
How to get users to visit Xiaohongshu more frequently? “It doesn’t have to be about overseas shopping guides. Can’t you share what you buy in China?” The team reflected. They have launched a “tag” function, where users click on the product in the picture and three branch-shaped tags will be created, pointing to the brand, price and shopping location. The source of inspiration is science fiction, “click the screen and Biu will fly out”. Correspondingly, the opening slogan of Xiaohongshu changed from “find good things overseas” to “good things all over the world”.
Naturally, in addition to sharing products, users also began to share other consumption decisions in life, such as how to choose a restaurant and hotel. Later, Xiaohongshu decided to encourage users to show their faces. In the fashion category, the team guides users to take selfies in the fitting room and share makeup and lipstick test colors. The main purpose is to hope that users can share folk wisdom and life experience in Xiaohongshu. The opening slogan of Xiaohongshu has also experienced from “good things in the world” to “good life in the world” to today’s “mark my life”.
In 2017, the founding team internally regarded the attempt to “show face” as the first node of the generalization of Xiaohongshu. “If the content of today’s Xiaohongshu is still mainly objects, it will become more like a search engine page.” More “people” emerge, which can not only show more aspects of life, but also the content behind the content” People” also gives content reliability.
Until this point, Xiaohongshu could be called a community for sharing lifestyles. Sakuragi said that the team’s wish is that ordinary people can talk sincerely and equally in Xiaohongshu, and the atmosphere is quite friendly. This year is also a time when Chinese people frequently mention “consumption upgrade”, and people are willing to explore “better” in various quadrants of life.
Different from “tool products”, the key to “community products” is to find core groups and develop a unique discourse system, so as to form a certain community culture, attract more people to come, and then continuously consolidate community culture. The “wall” of the community. Although there was no clear product picture at the beginning, every step of Xiaohongshu revolved around providing users with information value in all aspects from shopping to life, and time has precipitated it into a bottom-level community culture. Later, Xiaohongshu internally summarized it as “usefulness”.
“LatePost” learned that at the beginning of this year, for every 10 users who entered Xiaohongshu, 6 will use the search function, and this ratio is about 3 in Douyin and Kuaishou. Users are more willing to seek “information value” or “the solution to life” on Xiaohongshu.
Sakuragi described the process of gradually enriching the content of Xiaohongshu as “the extension of adjacent sides, which is a relatively non-jumping development”, and the generalization path is relatively natural and healthy.
“The concept of community only became popular in the first two or three years. Everyone suddenly compared cities and products. At the initial point of time, we did not have these words.” Sakuragi looked back after the fact, “But in fact we Been doing this since day one.”
When refinement is diluted
As each community grows, its core culture and atmosphere will inevitably be diluted and alienated. According to “LatePost”, as of August 2022, the monthly active data of Xiaohongshu APP has increased by 34% year-on-year, and it is also one of the few Internet platforms with a user growth rate of over 30%.
At first, Xiaohongshu was better than “a lot of content and opinions come from life, but a little bit ahead of life”, which is called “15-degree angle” internally. In the early years, Xiaohongshu was often compared to China’s Instagram. This is related to the years when the demand for “consumption upgrade” was the strongest, and people had a stronger longing for “ceremonial sense”.
However, in the past year or two, more and more users have experienced different lifestyles. After experiencing the sense of ritual, they need more “realism” and have more comprehensive information to help make consumption decisions, and even life decisions, such as small The job search content of the red book. People can clearly feel that the “circle expansion” of Xiaohongshu is accelerating. Will this acceleration dilute the community atmosphere and core context of Xiaohongshu?
Yin Shi, the head of Xiaohongshu’s ecology, said that the core context of Xiaohongshu as a community has always been “sincere sharing”. “What is diluted is exquisiteness, which is not necessarily a bad thing.”
After users from different circles and groups join, Xiaohongshu has more and more usage scenarios and more levels of needs, and “truth” and “diversity” become more important. For example, when traveling, some users tend to have a sufficient sense of ritual, while others need relatively comprehensive and objective content to help themselves make pragmatic travel strategies. “Sincerely share the bottom line, and the varied content that is more in line with the needs of users must be the direction of Xiaohongshu.” Yin Shi said.
Yinshi was responsible for the growth of Xiaohongshu’s users. One of his responsibilities is to find materials for delivery in Xiaohongshu, that is, to find content with better exposure on the platform. In 2020, he gradually found that a lot of very eye-catching and thrilling content appeared on the platform, and publishers would highlight conflicts between different regions or different groups of people. In addition, Xiaohongshu also launched short videos, and there will be a lot of “chaotic video content” in the early stage of the video ecology. Some core users of the community feel that the taste of the platform has changed.
When users are encouraged to look at life from a higher angle than life, life will become an advertising poster. “Filters”, “showing off wealth” and “false grass planting” are the products of excessively high angles, which will also lead to more intense value debate. This is also the governance conundrum that Instagram has faced since its inception.
In April 2020, the Xiaohongshu Community Ecology Department was born, and Yinshi became the head of this department. He now has a mobile phone on hand, with more than 2,000 users, and keeps replying to their feedback messages every day.
“False grass planting” has existed since the first day of the content industry ecology, and it is also a problem that Xiaohongshu has been managing since last year. Yinshi realized that it did not provide a solution to this matter in terms of governance and dredging at an earlier point, and it would be more sluggish to solve it after it became an industry habit.
The reason behind the traceback is that Xiaohongshu is a content platform, and its “grass-planting attribute” will naturally attract brands to do marketing and promotion. The marketing of brands and the realization of bloggers are all reasonable demands. Yinshi believes that Xiaohongshu should build an orderly community business order earlier, so that users, bloggers and brands can get the benefits of “health”, which also requires the gradual establishment of governance capabilities and order principles.
“Half the time we are doing ecology, we are looking at problems. Only by clearly seeing the motivation, behavior and environment behind ecology can we implement it.” Yin Shi said.
In addition to machine auditing and manual auditing of false content and behaviors, the platform has also made some adjustments, that is, from the author’s dimension, behavioral characteristics, external information, etc., to see which authors often publish Ruanguang, and what is Ruanguang’s external ecology. While constantly eliminating fake grass-growing content, Xiaohongshu will give more traffic to those content and authors with high authenticity. “It is impossible for the ecology to make every content completely true, but authors who continue to share truthfully and actively interact with users will be more favored. Xiaohongshu mentioned in the 2021 community convention that “sincere sharing is the responsibility of Xiaohongshu.” Traffic Password”.
Compared with other content platforms, many people feel at ease with the peaceful community atmosphere of Xiaohongshu. The overall content style on Xiaohongshu is relatively uniform, and the content categories are almost next to each other, “adjacent to each other”. Gives the feeling of being “disturbed”. Life experience points to the yearning for a better life, which is itself universal. It is not surprising that more people are flocking to Xiaohongshu.
Different from purely data-driven Internet companies, Xiaohongshu has to stagger to understand people and feel the subtle changes in lifestyle. But the market’s expectations are getting more and more enthusiastic, and Xiaohongshu has to learn to find a more subtle balance between the establishment of community atmosphere, user scale and commercialization. But it’s not easy.
(Sakuragi, Kappa, and Yinshi are the names of Xiaohongshu potato)
This article is reprinted from: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1340
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