Xiaohongshu pushes its products to target the elderly

Xiaohongshu is actively expanding its user base through large-scale offline promotion activities, especially targeting the elderly market with huge potential. This offline promotion is characterized by high-price incentives, fission mechanism and sinking strategy, which not only brought significant user growth to Xiaohongshu, but also aroused the industry's attention to the Internet behavior and content preferences of the elderly group.

Today, if you have a chance to get 6 eggs for free at a vegetable market in Beijing, the most unexpected possibility is to download Xiaohongshu.

Starting from May 2024, this app with over 100 million daily active users and over 300 million monthly active users is quietly launching a large-scale offline promotion. Similar to all the offline promotions in the past, the core weapons are still eggs, steamed buns and laundry detergent, and Xiaohongshu is no exception.

Ground promotion itself is not uncommon. As an old means of attracting new users on the Chinese Internet, the effectiveness of the human wave tactic has been repeatedly and successfully verified, from shared bicycles and community grocery shopping to the short video talent war initiated by Douyin and Kuaishou. It has always been the most original, direct and effective way to solve problems.

However, when the offline promotion happened to Xiaohongshu, it was inevitable that there would be a collision between egg buns and sophisticated celebrities. After all, the founders Mao Wenchao and Qu Fang only used 7 PDFs to form the prototype of Xiaohongshu. These 7 popular travel destination shopping guides almost determined the temperament of Xiaohongshu that has continued to this day - a refined and practical community, and gathered a group of urban users who yearn for quality of life and pursue tonality and humanistic spirit.

After publicly announcing its intention to open up the commercialization and e-commerce closed loop in 2025, Xiaohongshu wants to make more money. In addition to coming up with more suitable tools and stimulating more merchants to join, its potential naturally lies in more people outside the existing traffic pool. Xiaohongshu once stated that its goal is 300 million daily active users. Now it has returned to the two most fundamental purposes of all community apps: attracting new users and retaining existing users.

1. High price, fission and sinking

Service provider Wang Qiang used three words to summarize the characteristics of Xiaohongshu's offline promotion for 36Kr - high price, fission and sinking.

The price of offline promotion is determined by demand. Wang Qiang said that during the most intense period of the Douyin-Kuaishou war, even the last-minute offline promotion had signs of burning money. At that time, the highest price a successful Douyin Express user could get from offline promotion was 45 yuan. Because of their generosity, Douyin and Kuaishou were once called the "most conscientious companies" in the offline promotion industry.

This is not just one person's opinion. Another service provider said that although the battle between the two companies is a thing of the past, the price of offline promotion has been reduced again and again as traffic is saturated, but until the first half of 2024, a new user of Douyin Express can still be worth up to 20 yuan, "Douyin will still lose some demand from time to time according to business changes." To some extent, Internet products have been iterated for a long time, but offline promotion has never disappeared. Wang Qiang told 36Kr that to this day, Soul and Momo are still doing offline promotion, but the price is not high, "only a few yuan", which is not competitive among many platforms.

But in today's range, the narrative of burning money to attract new users is long gone. Xiaohongshu has come from behind and offers the most competitive prices among all Internet companies.

According to Wang Qiang, the current ground promotion price for successfully attracting a new Xiaohongshu user can get a maximum return ranging from 34 to 38 yuan, depending on the three levels of promoter, partner, and senior partner.

The core of these returns lies in the assessment of secondary retention (retention on the second day after downloading) and seventh retention (retention on the seventh day after downloading). If you only attract new users on the same day, you can only get a settlement of about 10 yuan. An interesting observation is that the change in the attitude of Internet companies towards attracting new users can also be seen in the price structure of local promotion - compared with the efficiency of grabbing people in the early days, after the traffic peaked, the company obviously cares more about the length of time users stay than the growth figures.

There is no gain without pain, so the ground promotion team naturally shifted. Starting from the second half of 2024, Wang Qiang's team quickly shifted from Douyin and Kuaishou to the ground promotion business of Xiaohongshu. "Our team has 120 people, with an average of 30 orders per person per day. Now we only focus on Xiaohongshu."

Another feature is fission. Xiaohongshu has chosen a promotion system for local sales, which allows local salespeople at different levels to receive incentives from their direct subordinates for attracting new users. This is also what Kuaishou used to do. "This hierarchical fission means greater investment and faster results," said an industry insider. The effect is obvious. Wang Qiang told 36Kr that the competition among Xiaohongshu service providers is now very fierce. They are all expanding their teams at the fastest speed, waiting for an explosion of personnel flow during the Spring Festival.

After more than ten years of establishment, "youth" and "usefulness" have been engraved in Xiaohongshu's corporate temperament. Xiaohongshu now has 300 million monthly active users, with a male-female ratio of 3:7, of which 50% are born after 1995, 50% are users in first- and second-tier cities, and the average daily user search rate reaches 60%. Therefore, Wang Qiang's push strategy is naturally the opposite. Male users, middle-aged and especially elderly groups are their key groups to attract new users on Xiaohongshu.

China now has nearly 1.1 billion Internet users, and the Internet penetration rate is close to 80%, but there are still large differences in population and region. Wang Qiang has been engaged in the field of marketing for many years. According to his observation, "In fact, among people over 40 years old, both men and women, only a few really use Xiaohongshu" - this seems to confirm a reality that in the Internet world, different people are tightly wrapped in each other's cocoons - just like a city white-collar worker now finds it hard to imagine that there are people around him who have never heard of Xiaohongshu.

Since the second half of 2024, Xiaohongshu has seen a significant increase in new users. According to Jiguang data, as of November 2024, Xiaohongshu's monthly active users have reached 330 million, with significant growth in October and November, with monthly active users increasing by 56 million and 63 million respectively, doubling the average value of about 30 million in other months of 2024.

As for how long this offline promotion will last, unlike some reports that it is as long as 4 years, based on past experience, Wang Qiang estimates it will be 2 years. "Over the years, the life cycle of each APP offline promotion project, from start to finish, is basically two years," he said.

2. The Proposition of “Retention”

Xiaohongshu's most recent large-scale marketing campaign can be traced back to the 2024 Spring Festival Gala project. As the most popular national gala, the Spring Festival Gala has always been a battleground for leading Internet companies. The well-known WeChat red envelope "Pearl Harbor attack" incident was born during the Spring Festival Gala.

It can be seen that with the monthly active users exceeding 300 million in 2023 and the growth rate of user scale having slowed down or even stagnated, Xiaohongshu has actually been covering people of all ages and all levels of cities for a long time. The Spring Festival Gala and offline promotion are just the difference between online and offline.

However, beyond breaking the circle, retaining users is the most long-term proposition for every Internet company. Otherwise, big companies would not have been competing so hard on daily and monthly active users over the years.

In order to attract more users and keep them using the app, Xiaohongshu has been making adjustments from product form to content supply. One example is that from horizontal screen to vertical screen, Xiaohongshu's video interface is becoming more and more like Douyin and Kuaishou, and there are more and more video content recommendations on the community homepage. In 2024, the number of video creators preferred by the app is 1.48 times that of the same period last year. Behind this is Xiaohongshu's increased investment in video. Although it started with pictures and texts, Xiaohongshu has to admit that the natural fast pace of short videos gives it a viral transmission characteristic that pictures and texts do not have. This is also a necessity for Xiaohongshu to please sinking users.

As for the content supply of the community, it is no secret that Xiaohongshu has added pan-entertainment vertical content such as games and digital products, with the purpose of expanding male users. However, a person close to Xiaohongshu said, "There is an effect, but most of the people who stay in the end are men who are good with women." From the results, Xiaohongshu still attracts more game content such as otome games that attract female users.

Perhaps in the short term, the most likely group to achieve a breakthrough in retention is the elderly. On January 6, Xiaohongshu’s latest data showed that by the end of 2024, the number of monthly active users over the age of 60 has exceeded 30 million, and the number of elderly creators has tripled in the past two years, with a total of more than 100 million notes published. At this point, service providers can also trace their efforts to attract new users from the elderly group.

According to Mob Research Institute data, the top five types of short videos preferred by China's elderly population are news, history and culture, military, health and wellness, and positive energy. In this regard, WeChat Video Account has taken advantage of its proximity to the water tower to the extreme - the popular science videos for the elderly that are flooding the screen in the family group are a typical example.

In fact, Xiaohongshu has also been thinking about the preferences of the elderly, but it is relatively low-key. The aforementioned person told 36Kr, "Xiaohongshu actually has an 'Old Hongshu' project team, which has been doing treasure appraisal-related business for a long time, even before Qingquan Treasure Appraisal became popular, but it did not become popular."

The needs of the elderly group cannot be underestimated. The popularity of "Xiu Cai" and "Yi Xiao Qing Cheng" on Douyin once shaped the fragmented traffic landscape of the Internet. Xiu Cai's smile can attract millions of likes. However, even if we know the preferences, what kind of content the elderly create on Xiaohongshu must also conform to the current community tone of Xiaohongshu. From observation, the elderly accounts with few fans but high likes (meaning recommended by the platform) are mostly long pictures and texts sharing daily life and life experiences.

It is not difficult to imagine that after large-scale promotion, Xiaohongshu will definitely find a way to retain new users. However, one thing that is certain is that the retention method will no longer be as extensive as the short video platforms in the past that gave out hundreds of millions of red envelopes during the Spring Festival Gala. The era of miracles through great effort is over. After all, every penny spent now and every new person attracted will eventually be recovered through commercialization.

(Wang Qiang is a pseudonym in this article)

Author | Zhong Yixuan Editor | Qiao Qian