8,200 words of practical experience in operating Xiaohongshu, no marketing but only practical stuff!

As a rare traffic depression, Xiaohongshu still has many opportunities to try. The author of this article shares his own case, from the initial setup to how to operate, and gives detailed methods.

Recently, I have been thinking about a new project in the company: Xiaohongshu. After a long period of exploration, the number of fans of this account that I operated from 0 to 1 has exceeded 65,000, and the GMV is close to 4 million. The path is the model of content + delivery + lead acquisition + private domain conversion and high customer orders.

Overall, it was quite successful. Of course, doing a project is not always smooth sailing, and there were many pitfalls, big and small.

I wrote this article today to share with you some of my experiences in operating this account. I hope it can be a reference for those who want to do Xiaohongshu now. The article contains:

1. What I think is the success of this account

2. Why do we need to create Xiaohongshu?

3. How to build a Xiaohongshu account from 0 to 1

4. The Amazing Features of Xiaohongshu SEO

Part 1 What I think is the success of this account

1. SOV accounts for 74%, and the user's mindset about our brand has basically been formed on the site

(SOV definition: exposure of a brand’s advertisement under a certain search term/exposure of all notes under the search term, representing the brand’s penetration in the search field);

2. The GMV output value of a single account is nearly 4 million, with good conversion rate and ROI performance, becoming a rising star in the company's million-level performance channel, and also one of the company's customer acquisition channels with a high investment-to-production ratio and conversion rate;

3. About 3% of the customer leads are overseas users, which lays a user foundation for the company to expand its overseas business;

4. The original products were of a single form, targeting a single and limited group of people. Xiaohongshu's online users are young, diverse and have strong purchasing power, which provides a basis for the company to develop new products and expand new businesses.

Part 2 Why do you want to create Xiaohongshu?

Based on my experience in operating Xiaohongshu, I will answer this question from four aspects: platform, users, rules and functions.

1. About Xiaohongshu platform

(1) Low threshold for creation

Compared with deep content platforms such as Bilibili, Zhihu, and WeChat Official Accounts, the creation of seeding content on Xiaohongshu is relatively easy and simple. However, easy and simple content does not mean no value, and it includes both pictures and short videos. Creators can choose according to their own advantages.

(2) Good community atmosphere

According to Xiaohongshu's official disclosure, by 2024, Xiaohongshu will have 120 million users posting purchase notes related to "where to buy, links, how much", with monthly active searches accounting for 70% and active searches accounting for 88%. This is enough to show that Xiaohongshu's search is a very important consumer decision-making field. Users can find solutions to their own life fields through a large number of UGC notes. The mutual help and discussion among users makes the atmosphere of the Xiaohongshu community unique.

For example: A blogger posted a note on how to choose travel clothes on Xiaohongshu, asking strangers on the Internet to help him choose the best one. This post for help received many comments.

Why is community atmosphere important?

Because of this community atmosphere, Xiaohongshu has become the first choice for female users to communicate about their beautiful lives, and it also differentiates Xiaohongshu from other social platforms. Many users like this community atmosphere and choose to take root in such a community. For content creators, creating content in such a friendly atmosphere can make them feel more secure. From a business perspective, users in communities with a good atmosphere are more sticky and more active, and the quality of users is guaranteed.

(3) Strong monetization capability

From the project I worked on, the sales staff generally reported that Xiaohongshu’s users are of higher quality and have a stronger willingness to pay. They usually have clear goals and are very happy to place an order once they have made up their mind.

Some friends may say that this may be related to the industry your company is in, the products you choose, or the customer acquisition-sales conversion link. I don’t deny it, but it is not absolute. Why?

At the Growth Brand Conference held by Xiaohongshu on September 13, 2024, Xiaohongshu CMO Zhiheng said that Xiaohongshu users tend to pay more attention to:

Product quality > Self-pleasure > Value for money > Public reputation > Product design/innovation > Price > Brand.

In the sales process, we often hear that the reason users do not buy is that they are "dissuaded by the price". In fact, price is not the first factor in the purchase decision for Xiaohongshu users. Relatively speaking, they are not indifferent to the price, but are willing to pay for better quality products and products with higher emotional value.

The consideration factor of "brand" comes last, so Xiaohongshu users are very receptive to new products, good products, and new brands, which is enough to reflect the payment motivation of Xiaohongshu users.

The above information is for business friends. For ordinary college students, office workers, and freelancers who want to do a side job, the possibilities here are even greater.

Because the general delivery model adopted by Xiaohongshu brands is:

① Use passers-by, amateurs and junior experts (with 500-50,000 fans) to increase the volume and let them improve product reputation by sharing their experience of using the product, thus maintaining brand popularity during mass launch;

② Let mid-level influencers (50,000-500,000 followers) conduct more in-depth promotion and evaluation to consolidate social influence and improve brand exposure and even conversion effects;

③ Let top influencers, well-known KOLs, and celebrities (with more than 500,000 fans) create momentum and guide topics to further amplify the commercial effect.

Therefore, no matter how many fans you have, you will become the target of brand advertising.

In addition, if your account does not have many fans in the early stage, you will generally receive exchange cooperation invitations from brands (the brand will send you things for free, and you publish content for them for free/at a low price), but as the fan base grows, your advertising quotes will also become higher and higher.

Quote reference:

• Less than 10,000 fans → Quote a few hundred yuan
• 10,000 to 20,000 fans → Price 1,000 to 2,000 yuan
• 20,000 fans - 100,000 fans → 2,000 - 10,000 yuan
• 100,000 followers - 500,000 followers → 5,000 yuan - 20,000 yuan
• 500,000 followers - 1 million followers → 10,000 yuan - 50,000 yuan
• More than one million fans → 50,000 yuan to several hundred thousand yuan

Xiaohongshu account growth path: passerby → amateur → primary expert → mid-level expert → top expert → well-known KOL

2. About Xiaohongshu users

(1) User Ecosystem

By 2024, the platform will have 300 million monthly active users, with a male to female ratio of 3:7, 50% born after 1995, 35% born after 2000, and 50% users in first- and second-tier cities.

According to the 2024 Qiangua Active User Research Report (Xiaohongshu Platform) data, there are 8 types of crowd tags:

• 17%+ are urban GenZ (Generation Z, Internet natives, living in high-tier cities, prefer online shopping)
• 10%+ are urban blue-collar workers (living in high-tier cities, working in catering, transportation, retail, etc., and pursuing cost-effectiveness in shopping)
• 9%+ are urban white-collar workers (living in high-tier cities, mainly born in the 1990s, in the career struggle period, and pursuing convenience in shopping)
• 7%+ are small town youth (living in low-tier cities, closely following urban trends, with more time and more disposable income)
• Sophisticated mothers and urban middle class account for 6% each, while urban seniors and small town middle-aged people account for 3% each.

The labels for the segmentation of crowd portraits include: makeup lovers, foodies, mothers, home lovers, working class, health-conscious people, literary youth, etc.

Their common characteristics: love of life, love of sharing, high consumption; focus: makeup, dressing, skin care, food tutorials, weight loss exercises, etc.

(2) Creator Ecosystem

Xiaohongshu has more than 80 million sharers, and 90% of users are UGC content. According to the data from the "2024 Xiaohongshu Creator Trends" report, in August this year, the number of monthly active creators on Xiaohongshu was 1.35 times that of the same period last year.

Secondly, the number of video and live broadcast creators has grown faster than the overall market. The number of video creators is 1.48 times that of the same period last year, and the total number of live broadcast creators is 2.48 times that of the same period last year. This shows that the entire Xiaohongshu video and live broadcast ecosystem is growing rapidly.

Third, the proportion of video note readings is about 22% higher than the number of video note publications, which means that demand is still far greater than supply, and everyone is encouraged to continue producing videos.

For Xiaohongshu players who are keen on making money, they all use conversion as the core indicator to create content, so no matter what form the content takes, as long as users like it, it is worth trying.

It is worth noting that under the decentralized algorithm mechanism of Xiaohongshu, traffic is not concentrated on top influencers. Instead, it gives junior and mid-level influencers great room for commercial monetization. Although there are many competing creators on the platform, small bloggers have great potential in both traffic acquisition and commercial monetization (ordinary people also have opportunities).

3. About Xiaohongshu Rules

(1) Platform algorithm and recommendation mechanism

Audit: Machine audit and manual audit

Collection: Only collected notes can be recommended. Enter the note title in the search box and click the "Latest" option. If this note appears on the search results page, it means it has been successfully collected.

Matching push: The system will tag the notes with a certain number of tags based on the keywords in the notes, and then push the notes to people who are interested in these tags

Based on the CTR+CES value, we will judge whether we can make the next round of recommendations. If your note click-through rate is less than 10%, it means that the first picture and title of the note are average and cannot efficiently convert exposure into user clicks; if your CES value is low, it means that your content value is low and cannot attract likes, collections, comments, etc., and cannot help the platform retain users.

CES=1 point for likes + 1 point for collections + 4 points for comments + 4 points for reposts + 8 points for followers. The higher the CES value, the better the quality of your content. It is either meaningful enough or able to resonate with people's emotions.

(2) A note has 4 traffic entrances

Discover, follow, search, local

① " Discover" page

Key points: Account weight + content CES score (hot item)

Under the algorithm mechanism, everyone's "Discover" page notes are different. The system tags different users based on the types of notes they browsed and their interactive behaviors, and then recommends the content that users are interested in to the "Discover" page through algorithms. If you want your notes to start on the "Discover" page, you need to embed precise keywords in the notes, and use the note tags to find the user tags.

②" Follow " page

Fans must follow the account, and the most recently posted notes will appear on the fans' follow page. The notes here are random, not necessarily arranged in chronological order, and the traffic accounts for a small proportion. Therefore, the number of fans cannot determine the traffic of the notes. Even the notes posted by accounts with hundreds of thousands of fans are not stable; even accounts with 0 fans may have a hit.

③“ Search ” page

When introducing the Xiaohongshu platform earlier, it was mentioned that monthly active searches accounted for 70%, and active searches accounted for 88%, which is enough to show that Xiaohongshu's search is a very important consumer decision-making field. Many users use Xiaohongshu as a search engine.

If the notes contain hot search terms and the search ranking of the hot search terms is high for a long time, it can bring good long-tail traffic to the notes.

The system will also recommend subdivided scenario words under the search keywords. For example, if you search for "green radish", words such as "hydroponics" and "maintenance methods" will appear, which can also be used as inspiration for topic selection.

④ " Same city " page

It will locate your city and automatically match content related to local travel, food, store exploration, attractions, etc.

Users click on the "Same City" page with expectations. If your creative field is strongly related to the same city, then this is a plus. When posting relevant notes, you can add the location of your location, and big data will match the notes to the corresponding users based on the address and other tags. If the content positioning of your account is not related to local life, then you can ignore this page.

PS: Why are the notes on Xiaohongshu arranged in two columns?

Double columns can give users the opportunity to actively choose, which also means that the content needs to be high-quality enough to be selected by users in the double-column flow.

4. About Xiaohongshu’s functions

(1) Release Notes

Pictures: 18;

Video: 5 minutes (15 minutes if the video account function is activated);

Title: 20 characters;

Text: 1000 words (including punctuation)

Modification: title, text, and pictures of graphic notes; previously, only the title, cover, and text of video notes could be modified, but now you can also replace published videos.

Collection: Previously, this function was only available for video notes. If you wanted to categorize text and picture notes, you could only use the favorites function. Now, both videos and pictures can be included in collections.

(2) Page functions

Pin Notes: Publish more than 20 notes

Comments will be pinned: When a note has 50 comments or a video account is opened

Video ID: 500 fans

Private message reply: Private message quick reply requires more than 1,000 fans

Professional account: can be activated after real-name authentication

(3) Platform rules

① Avoid off-site traffic diversion: including but not limited to WeChat ID, QR code, website link, and watermarks of other websites;

②Avoid malicious likes: If you invite multiple people to like a post in a short period of time without any browsing history, it may be identified by the platform as malicious likes. If you are unable to determine the scale, it is recommended not to invite others to like a post in bulk, but to allow the content to be recommended to precise users through algorithms, so that users on the platform can interact spontaneously.

③Avoid using some illegal words: You can use "Zero Gram Word Check" to detect.

④ Avoid blunt advertising: Follow the principle of "sincere sharing, friendly interaction" , combine life scenes and pictures or videos, and sincerely share your experience of using the product.

There are many tips on how to maintain an account on the Internet. In fact, for ordinary users, there is no need to maintain an account on Xiaohongshu. You can just post notes directly. If the account is restricted due to violations, you need to maintain the account and post normal notes for a period of time to gradually restore the account to normal traffic.

The account has posted notes a long time ago, and you now want to change the creative field. If the account has not violated any rules, you can directly use the account and delete the previous notes or set them to be visible only to yourself. However, do not delete too many notes in one day, and keep it within 10.

Part 3: How to build a Xiaohongshu account from 0-1

1. Business model positioning

In a nutshell: share XX with XX people, solve XX pain points, and monetize through XX

eg1 Gardening blogger: Share balcony flower-growing skills and good things with urban people who love to grow flowers and have balconies, solve the pain points of balcony flower-growing difficulties, not knowing how to create landscapes but wanting to have a sea of ​​flowers on the balcony, and realize monetization through implanting flower-growing courses + physical products

eg1 Home blogger: Share decoration experience and good things for small-sized families, solve the pain point of small space and wanting to decorate beautifully, and realize profits by inserting affordable good things into advertisements

eg2 Food blogger: Share quick fat-reducing meals (referring to dishes with simple preparation steps that can be prepared in a short time) with office workers, solving the pain point of wanting to eat healthily but not having too much time to cook, and monetize by accepting advertisements to insert good food products, small kitchen appliances and other good things.

2. Clarify the monetization method

Brand cooperation: Notes carry brand products to obtain cooperation fees or free products. Even if the fan base is small, it can be monetized

Lead acquisition: It is best to open the spotlight flow, otherwise there will be a risk of off-site diversion. It is suitable for bloggers who sell high-priced products.

Selling goods in a store: suitable for bloggers who have their own products, but there is a threshold for amateur bloggers

Live streaming/live streaming rewards: account real-name authentication, 1,000 followers

Small list sales: earn commissions by selling goods from other merchants. Suitable for bloggers with a certain fan base (it is difficult for users to have this kind of shopping habits)

3. Account track positioning

Xiaohongshu has eight popular tracks: beauty and skin care, fashion and wear, mother and baby, home furnishing, food, sports and fitness, knowledge and emotions, and travel

Although Xiaohongshu started commercialization relatively late, it is still very popular today. At this year's Xiaohongshu Growth Brand Conference, there was a question: "How to create a new blue ocean in the internal competition?"

CMO Zhiheng mentioned a trend change: new products need to adjust from category brands to crowd-focused brands.

When it comes to category brands, it is not difficult to understand that in order to occupy a category in the minds of consumers with limited capacity, the best way for a brand to differentiate is to become the first, to be the leader or pioneer of the category. For example, when it comes to coffee shops, Starbucks is the leader of this category.

So, what is crowd branding? Simply put, it is to do business around a group of people. Products and marketing will focus on the core value group. In this way, the brand has a focus point, so that it can better make products and content.

Specifically, we link our products with the target groups we want to penetrate using buying point content (note that it is not selling point content, but why users buy from us), and use valuable product information that is relevant to users to stimulate their desire to buy.

A typical case on Xiaohongshu is Yaoguang, which used "crowd brand" to locate a track, achieved staggered competition, and achieved an average monthly sales of 1 million+. It found the core group - women aged 35+ in third- and fourth-tier cities, and became popular with the sensitive skin concealer stick, and then created a liquid foundation product with double the unit price (300 yuan+).

After reading this, have you had some thoughts about track positioning?

4. Account content positioning

What content to publish to attract targeted fans or attract brand partners.

(1) Create vertical content around a certain theme

For example, some accounts related to dressing only make segmented thematic notes around "shoes for petite women" and "outfits for fat girls", so that they can reach vertical users to the greatest extent.

There are also accounts like "Learn a flower every day". This type of account outputs vertical professional content around the knowledge system of green plants and flowers, and monetizes through note sales, expert collaboration, and other methods.

(2) Create content around the blogger’s personal IP and user groups

For example, the content published by fitness blogger "Amanda Qianma" includes sports and fitness, dressing, healthy diet, emotions, and parenting.

Personality accounts are more suitable for bloggers who are good at real-life appearances. At the same time, the fan base should be more than 100,000. At this time, you can create diversified content around the blogger himself and the user group. For newcomers, especially those who do not have differentiated identity labels and personality traits, it is recommended to start with theme accounts and slowly build your own personal brand while entering theme content.

5. About account design

(1) Account name

Name/Title+Field/Occupation/School/Identity

Such as "Shuo Shuo's Decoration Diary", "Photographer Lin Yun", "Peking University Sisters", "Senior Sister Xiao Xiao"

Method 2: Name/Title + Region

Method 3: Region + Field + Name/Title

Method 4: Use the name/title directly

(2) Avatar design

Real photos, cartoon avatars, LOGO

(3) Introduction design

① Identity label + achievement event + content positioning

②Personality label + achievement event + content positioning

③ Basic personal information/characteristics (height, weight, skin type) + slogan

④ Focus on expectations + content positioning + identity tags & achievement events + basic personal information

6. About content creation

When it comes to content creation, "explosive content" is the lifelong pursuit of every content operator. But here, I don't want to write about "how to create explosive content". If you search this topic online, you will find many methodologies to teach you how to write it. I just want to talk about the core elements of making explosive content on Xiaohongshu: click-through rate, number of likes, number of collections, number of comments and bullet screens, completion rate, number of reposts, and number of followers.

• To increase the click-through rate: the topic should have a wide audience, and the cover and title should be attractive. Xiaohongshu uses a double-column information flow model, which requires users to actively click (while Douyin directly recommends to users, focusing on the first few seconds of the video)
• The wider the audience covered by the topic, the more people will click on your note; the cover and title determine whether the user wants to learn more. The title is only related to myself and has nothing to do with the user, and cannot arouse the user's strong desire to click.
• To increase the number of likes: you need to make users feel emotional. Liking is the lightest interactive behavior. Feel like/feel good/feel amazing (learn new knowledge)
• To increase the number of likes: users must feel that it is useful. Most people collect notes for the future, to meet certain future needs. Notes with a large number of collections are mostly strategy, tutorial, and collection notes with high information density and rich content. Corresponding psychology: they are afraid of loss and do not want to miss out on high-quality information, so they choose to collect.
• To increase the number of comments and comments, you need to add interactive instructions. You can embed some action instructions in the notes to let users comment. Otherwise, users will read the notes, like or collect them and then go to the next note. If the data of comments and comments is particularly good, it is very likely that the system will judge it as popular content and recommend it to a larger traffic pool.
• To increase the completion rate, the content must be structured.
• To increase the number of forwarding: you need to make the content social. Generate resonance/have social currency/obtain behavioral instructions
• To increase the number of followers, you need to make the content more distinctive. A note should not only bring value to users, but also have strong content characteristics or personal characteristics, be liked and recognized by others, and make people want to gain long-term value here.

Part 4 The amazing thing about Xiaohongshu SEO

Regarding SEO, Baidu’s explanation is

In short, Xiaohongshu SEO is to improve the search ranking of notes by optimizing note keywords.

When I was working on Xiaohongshu, especially in the note-laying stage, I attached great importance to keywords and hot search terms. Because I had no advertising costs in the first few months, if I wanted to obtain free, accurate and long-term long-tail traffic, I had to cleverly follow the hot search terms and bury the keywords in both the account name/introduction and the content.

As mentioned earlier, search on Xiaohongshu is a very important consumer decision-making site, so the traffic from search keywords is equivalent to super-precise traffic, which is equivalent to easy-to-earn traffic. Under a certain search term, the higher your notes rank, the more chances your products will be seen by users, and the easier it will be to lead users' consumer decisions. This is the amazing thing about Xiaohongshu SEO, which is more suitable for ordinary people to break through.

Of course, although keywords can help you get free traffic, if you have a budget, I still recommend that you set aside part of the budget for search traffic planning. Why?

Because there is more than one search position, our natural flow notes cannot get a front position, but we can get it through advertising; or in other words, through advertising we can move the position of the notes forward a little bit. The essence is to spend money to improve customer acquisition efficiency.

1. How to dig deep into hot industry search terms?

The first one: Juguang platform keyword planning tool

You can select words from five dimensions, including note recommendation, word recommendation, upstream and downstream recommendation, and industry recommendation.

For example, when you input the keywords you want, it will recommend blue ocean keywords, peer-purchased keywords, dark horse keywords and high-click keywords. Blue ocean keywords and dark horse keywords are good keywords with low competitiveness and high demand. Because the Juguang platform is an official platform, the statistical data are relatively accurate and effective. However, only enterprise accounts that have been certified and opened for advertising functions can log in and use it.

The second type: third-party data analysis platform (Qiangua Data)

Qiangua is a data analysis platform focused on Xiaohongshu, which also has complete keyword ranking, comparison and download functions. (You need to be a member to use it)

The third method is Xiaohongshu platform (no threshold method, but very time-consuming)

There are 3 main types:

①Search bar drop-down box

On the Xiaohongshu search page, directly enter the keyword you want to search, such as "green plants", and a long list of keywords will appear below.

These are the related keywords summarized by the system based on the recent search frequency. You can just pick the ones that suit you. Generally speaking, the more popular the words are, the more popular they are. But it also depends on the frequency of our own search keywords. You can use a new account to search. If the keywords searched by 2-3 accounts have a high degree of overlap, then this keyword is worth promoting.

②Search results page

After entering the keywords, click to enter the search page, and you will see related keywords appearing in many places.

③Tag views

Generally, topic tags are added to the text box of notes. Click to enter the topic and you can view the number of views and related notes of the topic. At this time, we can go to the note page of our peers to collect statistics.

After finding the keywords, the next step is to arrive at the key step: how to correctly layout the keywords.

2. How to layout keywords

In addition to the layout of keywords in the title and body copy, you can also expand it from multiple dimensions.

1) Nickname and profile

It can be brand name + industry keyword/product keyword, such as Musu beauty instrument, Huazhi beauty instrument...

When people search for bloggers related to beauty devices, as long as the account has a good number of followers and recent interactions, it will easily be ranked at the top of user searches.

2) Text on the image

Most people tend to overlook that the text on the picture can also be recognized by the system, usually the core word + related words

3) Hashtags

At the end of each note, add relevant topic tags, usually related keywords.

You don't need too many, no more than 10, and don't add completely irrelevant topics.

4) Note content

There is one principle for arranging keywords in the content: words should be laid out in a layered manner, and avoid piling up. The same keywords should be distributed in alternate lines and sections. In each note, core words, related words, high conversion words, and hot search words can be used in combination.

However, the layout must be natural, not densely stacked, otherwise it will affect the reading experience. If the reading experience is not good, the completion rate of the notes will be poor, which will directly affect the data and weight of the notes.

5) Title

The last one is the title, and it is placed last because it is the most important.

There are three main functions of a title:

First, summarize the content of the note so that users can quickly grasp the key points;

Second, it affects the click-through rate. A good title knows how to grasp user needs and attract clicks.

Third, it is conducive to search. The correct title keyword layout helps the system classify notes and push them to the right people.

The keyword layout of the title usually requires at least one of several search terms, such as:

Key words: What does an omnimedia operator do? How to apply for an omnimedia operator?

Transformation word: Good news for Guangdong people, how to apply for the full-media operator exam in 2024❓

Related words: Girls don’t have to worry about employment, just take the exam to become an all-media operator❗

Author: Qiuqin, Official Account: Qiuqin's Operation Notes