After writing 1,000 popular articles on Xiaohongshu, I summarized these popular article routines

Creating a popular article on Xiaohongshu is often seen as an elusive art, but the author has summarized a series of replicable strategies and techniques through the experience of creating more than 1,000 popular articles. This article will deeply analyze the commonalities behind these popular articles, from clarifying the target audience, carefully selecting content topics, optimizing the cover and title, to polishing the main content, to reveal to readers how to systematically create a popular article on Xiaohongshu that can attract a lot of attention and interaction.

It is said that whether Xiaohongshu articles become popular is a mystery, and whether they become popular or not depends entirely on luck.

But after dealing with more than 1,000 popular articles, I saw the commonality behind these popular articles.

There must be data behind the phenomenon, and there must be reasons for the change in data. Hot articles can also have a standardized "production" process. Today, I will summarize the relevant experience and share it with you.

1. Who should I show it to?

To create a hit article, you must first identify the target audience for the content output, and create different content based on the differentiated pain points, needs and preferences of different groups of people.

1) General audience: Useful content

Since the general public has not had enough exposure to brands and products and is in an unknown state, it is urgent to attract consumers' attention through sharing of practical knowledge, brand stories, new product introductions, etc., to strengthen their awareness of the brand.

2) Interest groups: evaluation and recommendation content

Interested groups have already had a preliminary understanding of the brand and product, and then they need to make a more specific analysis of the product, cooperate with the scene display, and answer questions. The content types are mainly evaluation, recommendation, and seeding, and the content direction starts from the pain points of the group.

3) Core group: digging deep into pain points

The core group has a certain degree of knowledge and recognition of the brand, and they have already purchased the product to a large extent, so the purpose of the note is to retain it. For this type of users, the content direction mainly focuses on the pain points, and then combines the product selling points and user communication points to strengthen the conversion of new users and the repurchase of old users.

For example, for those with oily, acne-prone skin, the content is presented in the form of digging deep into pain points (sensitivity/maintaining stability/removing acne) + strengthening selling points/communication points

2. What to Talk About

The most fundamental factor in creating a hit article is its overall content. The higher the quality of the content, the greater the exposure it will receive. Therefore, the first task in creating a hit article is creative content.

1) Determine the topic

If a note does not have a good topic, it will lack a sense of communication and fail to attract audiences with similar experiences and feelings. Therefore, a good topic will greatly increase interactivity and will also be distributed more times. So how do you determine a good topic?

You can start from these directions:

1️⃣ Segment "drop-down words": Determine the users' high-frequency search words by observing and comparing the same track and category, so as to clarify the needs of consumers and select topics that users are interested in

2️⃣Use of marketing tools: By using marketing tools to help us clarify the topic, such as Dandelion, we can easily find popular high-quality notes and cases in different categories through the creative center on Dandelion. These high-quality notes can help us dig out existing high-quality topics.

3️⃣Build a topic library: In daily note browsing, you can collect and summarize the popular note topics that match your own positioning, and constantly extend and refine the topics, and summarize its core key points for future reference. Over a long period of time, a larger topic library will be formed for us to choose from, which will greatly improve efficiency.

2) Altruism of the Note Content

If you want to produce effective content on Xiaohongshu, you must start from the user's perspective, analyze what the user wants, and then create content based on their needs. At the same time, you must show your uniqueness based on your own positioning. Only in this way can the content resonate with users and be recognized.

1️⃣Content output: The content of the notes should be professional, informative, and able to solve various needs based on user pain points

2️⃣Optimize the note structure: The cover should have visual impact and be able to directly display the core selling points of the product to attract users to click and view further;

The title is concise and clear, extracting the core selling points to arouse users' curiosity and stimulate their desire to read;

Avoid homogeneity in content: the copy should be soft and have selling points, and avoid sensitive terms;

The video/picture should be clear and beautiful, and show the product highlights with real scenes;

Topics need to "take advantage of hot search terms", which can be divided into periodic hot topics and unpredictable hot topics, and attract user attention by adding topics;

And the most important thing is to actively guide and encourage interaction in the comment area to guide the trend.

3️⃣ Emotional value provision: Practical value, ensuring that the content can provide practical help to users, or emotional value, the content of the note resonates with users and meets their emotional needs

3. Content polishing

Xiaohongshu recommends in two columns, unlike Douyin’s single column flow. If you swipe, you see. The two-column flow tests the quality of the cover and title. Recommendation is useless, but attracting users to click is useful. All notes, covers and titles must be carefully polished before they are worth publishing.

1) What makes a good cover?

1️⃣ Beautiful pictures: Xiaohongshu is a community for female users, so a beautiful picture cover is very important. Beauty can be reflected in several aspects, such as beautiful scenery, beautiful structure, real beauty, beautiful people, etc.

2️⃣ Reasonable comparison: Before-and-after comparison has always been a high-click rate cover format on Xiaohongshu. If the product can play a role in influencing the before-and-after comparison, you can use the before-and-after comparison format more often, but you should pay attention to reasonable notes. You cannot highlight the contrast through photoshop or exaggerated forms, as notes are prone to violations.

3️⃣ Have highlights or information points: Put the most eye-catching highlights and information of the entire content on the cover to attract clicks

3) What kind of text is considered good text?

1️⃣Word count: Keep it short if possible. In fact, too long a text is not necessarily a good thing. The longer the text is, the more screens users need to scroll down. The more screens, the lower the completion rate. It is recommended that the text should not exceed 1,000 words.

2️⃣ Clear segmentation: Avoid piling up large paragraphs of text and divide the content into multiple small paragraphs, each of which expresses a core meaning to facilitate user reading

3️⃣ Use subheadings wisely: Use subheadings to separate different content sections to make the article structure clearer. For example, when writing about food production, you can write subheadings such as "Ingredients Preparation", "Cooking Steps", "Finished Product Display", etc.

4️⃣Add stickers and emoticons: Add stickers and emoticons that match the content to the copy, which is both beautiful and can enhance the copy atmosphere. For example, if you want to share a cute notebook, you can insert some cute cartoon stickers.

5️⃣ End with a guide to interaction: Ask questions at the end to trigger users to think and comment. For example, "Do you have similar skin care tips? Share them with me in the comments section."