A practical guide to analyzing Xiaohongshu’s competitive products!

On the fiercely competitive Xiaohongshu platform, in-depth understanding of competitive product strategies is crucial to brand success. This article will provide you with a comprehensive practical guide to Xiaohongshu competitive product analysis. From content delivery to brand account operation, we will break down the key steps and techniques of competitive product analysis one by one.

Know yourself and know your enemy, and you will never be defeated in a hundred battles

No one can ignore the importance of competitive product analysis. Only by understanding the categories and competitive products on Xiaohongshu can you accurately position your products, choose the communication points and the most efficient communication paths, and ensure that your products are competitive on Xiaohongshu.

As long as there are competing products that are widely distributed on Xiaohongshu in a category, they are very valuable for reference, because they can be used to determine which communication points have good feedback from Xiaohongshu users and which have poor feedback; they can also be used to determine which topics, scenarios, and formats have good communication effects. It can be said that before making a communication strategy, doing a good job of competitive product analysis can bring a lot of useful information and improve the efficiency of our communication strategy!

The topic of competitive product analysis has been discussed before, but not in detail. This time, I will talk about it from a practical perspective. How to do competitive product analysis on Xiaohongshu?

Next, I will introduce the two aspects of content and brand number.

1. Content

The delivery content refers to the delivery in Xiaohongshu in the conventional sense, including the basic data of competitors' delivery in the site, delivery content preferences, delivery experts, and fan distribution of competitors, etc. Here we generally choose the note data within 90 days as a reference

1) Basic data

[You can use charts and compare with this brand’s data]

Notes:

Basic data indicators

To analyze the note situation of competing products, we must first look at some basic data indicators:

Here we usually analyze and judge the exposure, clicks, interactions, likes and other indicators of competitors' notes.

By analyzing the data of competitor-related notes within 90 days, we can get the current attention of the competitor on the site. See if people have a high level of interaction with this brand? Do they pay attention to the brand-related notes?

This will allow us to make a basic analysis of the volume of competing products.

Business Notes/Non-Business Notes

Secondly, the number of business notes is also an important assessment criterion. Here we need to look at the number and proportion of business notes and non-business notes respectively.

Through the proportion of business notes, we can get the brand's delivery situation. If a brand has a high number of business notes, it means that the brand has more content delivery and the tap water volume on the platform is relatively less. Conversely, it means that the brand has a higher tap water volume on the platform.

However, the business notes captured from the data platform are not that accurate and can only be used as an auxiliary reference for decision-making.

Content format

The content format here is the simplest to understand. Let's see whether the notes placed by competitors on the site perform better in the form of pictures and texts or in the form of videos. This will provide a format direction for our subsequent note placement.

Negative Notes

For negative notes, you can search for the corresponding competitor brands directly on Xiaohongshu, or you can pull them from a third-party data platform to see if there are any negative reviews in the first few articles that appear under the brand keywords.

If there are a lot of negative comments in the first 30, 40, or 50 articles within 90 days, we can extract the relevant negative comments information to provide an evasive idea for our own brand content direction.

2) Hot Articles

Number of popular articles with hundreds/thousands/tens of thousands of likes

By conducting statistical analysis on the hot articles with 100 likes, 1,000 likes, and 10,000 likes of competitors, we can determine the proportion of hot articles in the overall delivery of competitors, and make a more specific judgment on the delivery of competitors on the site.

Number of impressions, clicks, total interactions, likes, etc.

After the above summary, we have already found out which content of the notes of competing products is better and which notes are of higher quality. Then we can conduct a specific analysis and disassembly of the top one or two popular articles.

By breaking down the hits and interactions of popular articles, we can extract key information such as the influencers, content focus, and note format of the notes, providing some reference and inspiration for subsequent creation of popular articles.

2. Content

1) Note content

Next is the content of the delivery part

The content of the notes on Xiaohongshu can be divided into: sharing of good things, evaluation, DIY production, tutorials, etc. Here we generally choose to use pie charts to clearly show the proportion of each content form.

By analyzing the focus of these notes, we can see which forms the notes with better performance in competitor products focus on, and then we can get the focus of our future note delivery.

2) Note tags and keywords

Perform a simple statistical analysis of competitor's note tags and keywords. For tags and keywords with better competitor data, we can directly quote them in our own brand notes.

3) Analysis of popular/hot article notes

After analyzing the data to get the popular notes, we first need to make a general analysis of the hot notes of competitors, and examine the content direction, note tags, etc. of the hot notes of competitors. Then we can analyze the top hot notes in a targeted manner, and look at the content tags, expert selection, publishing format, etc. of the notes with good data performance for reference.

3. Experts

The analysis of competitive product placement experts provides three dimensions of investigation:

The first is to examine the level and proportion of talents

Expert level/delivery ratio:

By analyzing the data of competing products, we can get the proportion of influencers who currently use competing products. According to the number of fans, influencers can be divided into top influencers, mid-level influencers, bottom influencers, koc, amateurs, etc.

Here is a formula for a brand to place influencers on Xiaohongshu, which can be used as a simple reference.

Of course, a brand’s influencer placement cannot be solved once and for all by a single formula. It also needs to be fine-tuned based on factors such as the influencer data distribution and output results of competitors.

Account type/proportion: Enterprise account/top influencer/amateur account…

Regarding the account categories of influencers, we need to distinguish them from the influencer levels mentioned above. We need to see whether the data source of the brand with a higher voice on the platform comes from influencers of competing products, or from competing brand accounts, or celebrity traffic, etc., so as to make a more objective evaluation of the data of competing products.

Expert types/proportion:

The type of talent that needs to be paid special attention to here

Check whether the influencers used by competitors are all related to the brand category or are there diversified combinations? If there are diversified adjustments, do the notes data from the influencers of different categories they choose show a better trend? If so, what specific categories are they combined with?

Based on the above questions, we can also come up with a diversified combination strategy for talent delivery types and make diversified scene combinations for our own delivery.

Fans section

The analysis of the fans of the competing products mentioned here mainly examines the audience of the competing products who place relevant notes on the site.

By simply analyzing the audience portrait of the relevant notes, we can get their basic information such as gender ratio, age distribution, and city.

Secondly, we can also find out what kind of content they pay more attention to in this brand or category on Xiaohongshu, that is, to find out their focus. By capturing consumers' focus, we can feed back our subsequent delivery.

Finally, we need to look at the fan group tags to determine potential consumer needs and combine products with diversified scenarios.

Brand Number

In addition to content delivery, brand accounts are another important step in Xiaohongshu’s on-site delivery. The analysis of competitor brand accounts should also start with basic data analysis.

Basic situation:

The data analysis of competing brand accounts can be carried out from aspects such as note data, fan growth, fan base, and note content.

Here we focus on the analysis of brand account note content

Unlike influencer marketing, brands can use brand accounts to directly introduce products and promote new products. They can also conduct various activities such as lucky draws and interactions within brand accounts. Therefore, when analyzing the content of competing brand accounts, it is necessary to classify and compare the data of different notes to see which aspects the competing brand accounts focus on more and what the data obtained is.

Conversion:

Since we have opened a brand account, we naturally hope to achieve a certain amount of on-site conversion. Therefore, the on-site conversion of competitor brand accounts is also one of our assessment indicators.

It is necessary to focus on studying the forms of online conversion of competitors, how the conversion content attracts traffic, online product links, interaction, etc.

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