Why is community live streaming a new growth trend for Xiaohongshu creators?

This article introduces how creators on the Xiaohongshu platform have achieved breakthroughs in content creation and commercialization through life-like live broadcasts, and how live broadcasts have become a new outlet for new and mature creators to increase fans and income.

At present, the creator ecosystem of each platform has entered a mature and stable stage.

As the number of creators surges, competition for graphic, text and video content becomes increasingly fierce. How to open up new growth paths in the saturated content market and break through the bottlenecks of content creation, fan growth and commercialization is a problem that every creator must face. Creators need to explore innovative ways of expression and more possibilities for commercialization.

Claure observed that on Xiaohongshu, some creators began to break the bottleneck through live streaming.

Data shows that in the first half of this year, the growth rate of Xiaohongshu live creators was higher than that of video creators and large-scale creators. The total number of Xiaohongshu live creators increased by 2.48 times, and the total number of Xiaohongshu video creators increased by 1.43 times.

Among them, there are some mature creators, including top bloggers and celebrity artists, who have found ways to innovate content and expand commercialization possibilities through Xiaohongshu live streaming; there are also new creators and even amateurs who have quickly increased their followers and established accounts on Xiaohongshu through live streaming.

After observing these live broadcast rooms, we found that their success path is replicable. It is not about directly copying their live broadcast content and live broadcast skills. The core is their overall thinking of doing live broadcasts. On the basis of retaining their personal characteristics, they start from the areas they are good at and love in life, and expand different styles of life live broadcasts. This is also the background color of the Xiaohongshu community ecology.

Next, Claure analyzed in detail what Xiaohongshu’s live broadcast is about from the perspectives of new and mature creators, and why creators at different stages can break through their bottlenecks through live broadcasts.

01 Live streaming is a new way for new creators to start their own accounts

In the Xiaohongshu community, where competition between text and video is becoming increasingly fierce, live streaming is currently a blue ocean and a strategic focus of the platform. With traffic support and relatively low competition, live streaming has become a new way for new creators to start their own accounts.

Live broadcasts can carry richer content and last longer, which places higher demands on the creators' output capabilities. The problem faced by new anchors is: what content can support long-term output and user retention? In fact, it is very simple. As mentioned above, your life and the areas you are good at and love are the largest material library for live broadcasts.

For example, @小莹子, who ranks at the top of the Xiaohongshu game live broadcast list, is a girl from Sichuan. Because she likes the game "Egg Party", she opened an account in 2023 to post her daily game life.

At the beginning of this year, @小莹子 started broadcasting on Xiaohongshu, live-streaming the process of playing games. In the live broadcast room, she used the egg-shaped tomato skin as her characteristic image, which was very memorable. As a Sichuan girl, she also explained the game in Sichuan dialect, and her live broadcast style was very humorous.

Since the start of the live broadcast, @小莹子 has maintained a very high speed of increasing followers, with more than 400,000 followers in half a year, and the number of likes on her notes has also increased from a few hundred to thousands and tens of thousands. Today, @小莹子's live broadcast room can bring in more than 30,000 yuan in revenue every month, and the highest can reach nearly 100,000 yuan.

There are also some creators who have successfully expanded their side businesses through live streaming.

@江江江小梨 works in an investment bank in Hong Kong. She started sharing workplace tips, interview techniques, book recommendations, etc. on Xiaohongshu in February this year, and started live streaming at the end of April. She uses her time after get off work to share her work life and experience in the English language.

At first, she just wanted to attract attention by live streaming across the UK. Gradually, she developed the live streaming room into a professional "career streaming room". Each live broadcast has a different workplace theme, and she invites corresponding professionals to communicate online. She also connects with fans to answer their workplace confusions.

Live streaming has accelerated her fan growth. Jiang Xiaoli, who originally expected to reach 50,000 fans in 50 days, has gained about 190,000 fans since the end of April. Currently, she has more than 200,000 fans, far exceeding expectations.

For creators who are not good at long-term monologue output, there is another way of live broadcasting, which is online live broadcast.

On Xiaohongshu, communicating and making friends through live broadcast rooms has become a normalized live broadcast mode, such as blind date, workplace experience exchange, foreign language corner, international student chat, online singing, etc. Creators can use a multi-grid live broadcast connection method to invite multiple viewers to connect on the microphone and discuss related topics.

For example, new creators @产品经理yomi and @布布糕, one is an Internet product manager practitioner, and the other is a senior headhunter. They conduct online mock interviews and workplace discussions through live broadcasts, and their online circles are full of practical information. A single live broadcast can attract tens of thousands of viewers.

Through the live broadcast attempts of these new creators, we can see that Xiaohongshu live broadcast has developed various forms, including single-mouth content output, 1V1 online interaction, and multi-grid live broadcast connection. New creators can choose the appropriate live broadcast method according to their own situation.

More importantly, Xiaohongshu's live broadcast room does not have very high requirements for live broadcast skills, but focuses more on the sense of life. On Xiaohongshu, as long as it is related to life and can provide users with practical value or emotional value, it can be put on the live broadcast room.

For example, @Andrea小安小安, who just entered college, majored in broadcasting and speaks fluent English. She does live chats in English in Xiaohongshu's live broadcast room, sharing her life and personal growth. She also won the "Live New Generation Anchor" award at the "Acquaintances 300" team-building meeting hosted by Xiaohongshu some time ago.

Another winner of the "Live New Generation Anchor" award is @王艺妍妤yanyu, who was an intern on "The Heart-Stirring Offer 5". On Xiaohongshu, you don't have to be a "workplace veteran" to be qualified to share your workplace experience and gain user attention. Although Wang Yiyanyu has not worked for a long time, she can share her real career advancement path with netizens from the perspective of her peers, and talk about the setbacks that everyone encounters and how she copes with them. Today, she can get more than 100,000 viewers for a single live broadcast, with a maximum of more than 2,500 online viewers, making her a new workplace idol in the hearts of young people.

02 Mature creators break through the bottleneck of increasing followers and commercialization by creating innovative content through live streaming

In the past six months, many mature creators have started broadcasting on Xiaohongshu. They already have a certain fan base on Xiaohongshu and have a long-term direction of outputting note content. Live streaming is a new way for them to achieve content innovation.

For example, @Olga姊, a 59-year-old former corporate executive, began sharing workplace tips and life growth experiences on Xiaohongshu in 2019. At the beginning of this year, Sister Olga started broadcasting on Xiaohongshu, and live broadcasting gave her workplace tips sharing a richer content form.

Olga has a video column called "Genius Girlfriend", which invites outstanding women with ideas and achievements in their careers to talk about their career development and personal growth. She also invites guests of this column to the live broadcast room to communicate and express their views, providing fans with more practical content besides videos.

In the live broadcast room, Sister Olga will also connect with fans and answer their questions 1v1. While interacting closely with fans, the useful information she shares is also more personalized. Fans' questions can also bring her more inspiration for topic selection, and she can feed back her notes to output content that is more up-to-date and more in line with users' real needs.

Zhao Xiaohui, a talk show performer who just started broadcasting recently, moved her talk show to the live broadcast room. Zhao Xiaohui, who works part-time to break into the entertainment industry, has long established the image of a "working man's mouth substitute" through some talk show jokes.

Since the first live broadcast of "holiday overtime" on Xiaohongshu during the Mid-Autumn Festival in September, Zhao Xiaohui has been sharing her workplace life and discussing workplace-related issues in the live broadcast room every Thursday night. With many years of workplace experience and the sense of humor of a talk show actor, Zhao Xiaohui's sharing in the live broadcast room can always speak the voices of netizens, attracting a large number of netizens to watch the live broadcast, with the highest number of online users in the live broadcast room exceeding 10,000.

Real-time interaction in the live broadcast room can inspire and create content, which can become widely disseminated material and help creators break out of the circle. Zhao Xiaohui's live broadcast room has produced famous scenes such as "Zhao Xiaohui makes PPT live", "Zhao Xiaohui experiences the sideline of being a star", and "discussing with Bu Jingyun without makeup how to get a raise without performance". Because they resonate with people and are funny enough, these clips are quickly spread. Among them, #Zhao Xiaohui is not as hard as going to work when being a star# Zhao Xiaohui's live broadcast has a strong sense of work and has become a hot search on both Weibo and Xiaohongshu.

Content innovation and going viral have also helped mature creators break through the bottleneck of fan growth.

Zhao Xiaohui gained 30,000 followers in her last three live broadcasts; Sister Olga has also achieved a rapid jump of 250,000 fans since she started broadcasting in April this year, which exceeds the total number of fans she has accumulated in five years.

Moreover, Olga's high-quality live broadcast content and high-quality fan base have made brands see the promotional value of live broadcast rooms and developed a new business cooperation model - live broadcast room sponsorship. She cooperated with the women's clothing brand SENSE BY MEI and wore branded clothing for display during the live broadcast.

Another person who has achieved a surge in followers and commercialization through live streaming is Li Dan. In February this year, Li Dan started a live streaming on Xiaohongshu with the theme of "Dan's Store", selling drinks, snacks and books. Starting in May, soliciting submissions and reading letters became an important part of Li Dan's live streaming. He would select fan submissions in advance, especially emotional submissions, and answer questions and resolve doubts half-complainingly and half-seriously, like a friend who eats melon seeds and chats with you, so that the audience can get some inspiration in laughter.

After starting the live broadcast of reading letters, Li Dan's live broadcast room gradually became popular, with 400,000 followers gained in 4 months. The number of online users increased from one or two thousand in early June to a stable level of one or two thousand later. Netizens who came to watch Li Dan read and reply to letters also began to "support him and buy". By July, the sales of Li Dan's live broadcast room exceeded one million, which is a very good figure for a live broadcast room that mainly sells snacks.

Li Dan not only increased his fan base and sales through live streaming, but his differentiated content and stable live streaming rhythm also gradually made his live streaming room a live streaming IP.

IPization has a longer-term help for Li Dan's content output and image building. After starting the letter reading live broadcast, Li Dan and the official account of "Dan's Store" began to publish wonderful clips of Li Dan's live broadcast, which not only supplemented the account content, but also promoted the live broadcast room and Li Dan himself; a number of Li Dan live broadcast clip accounts also appeared, and these contents were widely circulated and screened, further shaping Li Dan's image as an "electronic male bestie".

The live broadcast IP brings more possibilities for Li Dan’s content and commercialization . The “Dan’s Convenience Store” live broadcast room plans to expand into offline stores, offline variety shows and other models.

For creators who have accumulated a certain amount of fans and content, their core needs are to break through content bottlenecks, increase their fans, and find more possibilities for commercialization. Through the exploration of mature creators, it can be seen that live streaming is a new carrier to meet these needs.

03 Content live streaming is a new trend for Xiaohongshu

At this stage, Xiaohongshu has made content live streaming a strategic priority, allocating more traffic to the live streaming room . For example, live streaming has been integrated into the double-column flow of the homepage together with pictures, texts, and video notes. The avatar of the live streamer will show a breathing light that is visible in all areas.

Creators at different stages of growth have achieved greater possibilities for increasing followers and achieving commercial monetization through Xiaohongshu’s content live streaming, which also confirms the opportunities brought by Xiaohongshu’s content live streaming.

At present, there are two mainstream monetization methods for Xiaohongshu content live broadcasting: one is to send gifts in the live broadcast room, and the other is to support the purchase. In the future, brand business cooperation in the live broadcast room will gradually develop, such as brand sponsorship represented by Olga's live broadcast room, or "live broadcast room IP naming" like variety show naming.

In the past six months, not only the anchors mentioned in this article have emerged on Xiaohongshu, but also creators of various styles in many different fields such as workplace, personal learning, emotions, games, pets, life chat companionship, hobbies, music, outdoors, movies, etc.

Among them are celebrities and top creators that you and I are familiar with. For example, Shang Wenjie, who live-streamed the "100-day oral challenge" on Xiaohongshu, connected with Zhu Dan to discuss oral learning methods and answer fans' questions related to learning. She gained 15,000 followers in a single live broadcast and won multiple hot searches on Xiaohongshu, Weibo, and Douyin.

There are many more amateur creators who may share the same interests with us in life. For example, @软绵绵原味聖母 who live-streams handicrafts and shares her interests and hobbies, @土豆菜来也 who live-streams her pets’ daily life, @Baojong_ who live-streams outdoor travel plans…

Xiaohongshu’s live broadcast continues the authenticity and sense of life of the Xiaohongshu community content, and does not require creators to “sensationalize” or script live broadcasts to gain traffic.

Xiaohongshu's content ecosystem encourages creators to start from real life, broadcast what they are good at and really want to express in life, and provide value to users who pay attention to and care about the same field. Because of the emphasis on the sense of life, Xiaohongshu's live broadcast room does not need overly decorated scenery and words, and can even start broadcasting by setting up a mobile phone. The atmosphere in the live broadcast room is more relaxed and free of burden.

Whether you want to talk about study, work, family matters, pets, exchange interests and hobbies, share life experiences, or simply chat with netizens in the same circle for each other's company, creators share truthfully based on their life experiences and express themselves sincerely. This is the live broadcast with a sense of life that Xiaohongshu encourages.