6 truths you must know before posting on Xiaohongshu

To be successful on Xiaohongshu, brands need to deeply understand and follow the platform's rules and avoid common pitfalls. This article provides practical suggestions for brands, from complying with community rules to effectively using search scenarios, to help brands achieve precision marketing and efficient conversion on Xiaohongshu.

Let me set the tone first. Today's article does not have a long-winded methodology, but only a few practical advertising suggestions that are helpful and can be implemented. If you are a merchant who is currently advertising on Xiaohongshu, please read this tweet carefully.

1) There are rules for planting grass to avoid being deducted points

Xiaohongshu community has a brand violation penalty management mechanism. If you enter Xiaohongshu to do grass-roots marketing, you need to understand the community rules first. Blindly promoting grass-roots products may cause your brand to lose points on Xiaohongshu and fall into a situation where "this brand is not found" on Xiaohongshu.

Simply put, the brand violation penalty mechanism is mainly aimed at "underwater notes" that have not been reported to the platform. When the underwater notes reach a certain scale, points will be deducted, which may affect the brand distribution flow, or even directly remove the brand. The second is low-difference content, large amounts of plagiarism, repetition, serious clickbait, exaggerated before-and-after comparisons, and efficacy that has not been submitted to the platform for qualifications.

Therefore, before placing an ad on Xiaohongshu, you must understand the platform rules clearly and control the content well. Once points are deducted, you will need to recharge and consume to restore the normal score!

2) Don’t over-produce

Don't listen to the nonsense of some agencies that say you need to post hundreds of articles first. The list of experts provided by the agencies that usually recommend posting a large amount of articles first is likely to be filled with a large number of water accounts. Not only are these accounts full of advertisements, but the data is also made by inflating the volume or mutual warmth. These accounts have low weight and low inclusion, and almost no natural traffic. It can be said that they have no grass-planting effect.

If the brand already has a certain user base, you can encourage seed users to share spontaneously. The notes written by seed users are authentic and more touching. The target audience can see at a glance that the notes are not widely shared and have a certain influence. Seed users have a certain degree of loyalty to the brand, and you can encourage them to share their notes in the form of product gifts through activities such as "Product Experience Officer".

If it is a new brand and the budget is not high, you can use "Show Order Notes" to make amateur soft advertising notes. That is, each cooperating influencer first places an order in the store, and then publishes a note through the "Show Order Notes" on the order page. In other words, this note not only achieves 0-risk soft advertising, but also has a reasonable and compliant attached product link. The reason there is no risk of violation is because the influencer has a purchase record of the product, and then shares the product on Xiaohongshu. This action is encouraged by Xiaohongshu. No matter how many fans you are as an influencer, it is reasonable and compliant to publish notes through this path.

For brands, this method can not only help product links increase sales, increase positive reviews, and increase weight, but also avoid the risk of soft advertising violations. It can be said that it kills two birds with one stone and combines product quality and effect.

3) Effective viral articles can greatly help conversions

It has been officially verified that the popular articles on Xiaohongshu are of great help to product conversion, and this should be a point on which everyone can reach a consensus.

However! Hot articles can also be divided into invalid hot articles and valid hot articles. No matter how good the data of invalid hot articles is, it will not help conversion.

So how do we judge whether it is an effective viral article? I won’t go into a long discussion here. The simplest way is to look at the comment area. A viral article must have a lot of comments, but what everyone is saying is important. If the comments are all saying "sisters are so beautiful, this place is so beautiful", and they are all about the shooting scene and the comments of experts, and no one is asking questions about the product, then it is likely to be an invalid viral article.

A truly effective viral article will have at least one comment section asking about the product's efficacy or where to buy the product, and will have a large number of product-centric comments. Only this type of viral article will help with conversions.

Appendix: The proportion of hot articles produced by experts of different levels:

For articles with more than 1 million views, the rate of explosive articles is 66%+; for articles with 500,000-1 million views, the rate of explosive articles is 46%+; for articles with 100,000-500,000 views, the rate of explosive articles is 15%+; for articles with 100,000-100,000 views, the rate of explosive articles is 6%+; for articles with 0.5-10,000 views, the rate of explosive articles is 3%+; for articles with 0-0.50,000 views, the rate of explosive articles is 1%+4) Traffic investment is leverage, but you must first have a "fulcrum".

Many businesses have a misunderstanding of information flow, always thinking that the poor effect of my advertising is because I didn’t invest in traffic; my articles are not popular because I didn’t invest in traffic; my notes are always restricted because I didn’t invest in traffic. Be less self-indulgent and more self-examination.

Traffic injection can indeed increase a large amount of exposure in a short period of time, but because of different materials, the click effect is also different! Notes with poor natural traffic can only buy exposure by using traffic injection, but cannot bring clicks and interactions. Without clicks and interactions, it is not helpful to promote products. Only notes with good natural traffic exposure performance are worth using information flow to heat up. With the same exposure, you can get more clicks and interactions.

To judge whether a note is worth investing in, we should not only look at the display volume, click volume, CTR/CPE, etc., but also the return search rate (the ratio of users who search for keywords in Xiaohongshu within 48 hours after reading the information flow note, indicating that users search for brand-related words on the Xiaosuo Hongshu platform after reading the note, which is a process indicator of the success of the note planting). Notes with strong data in all aspects are worth investing in.

Therefore, in essence, information flow is just icing on the cake, and it cannot provide timely help. The click cost of low-quality notes will be infinite, and may even be higher than the purchase price of natural traffic. In this case, what is the point of investing in traffic? ? ? ?

5) Have a high tolerance for ROI

Planting grass is a long-term "project".

As more and more brands join Xiaohongshu, Xiaohongshu users are less and less receptive to product recommendations. It is difficult for just one recommendation to influence consumer decisions.

We need to face our target audience and repeatedly reach them through different interest circles, influencers of different levels, and different content types. Only after being planted with ideas many times can they form an impression in their minds.

From the early stage of building word-of-mouth, breaking the circle of communication to the later sales conversion, it may take several rounds of note delivery process. The whole cycle will be relatively long, and the conversion is also quite long-tail. It is necessary to extend the conversion cycle to look at the ROI in order to effectively calculate the effect of the delivery on Xiaohongshu.

Many brands stopped their first round of advertising because they saw no short-term effects. Therefore, before advertising on Xiaohongshu, please be prepared to have a high tolerance for ROI in the short term.

If it is a brand that is in urgent need of conversion, you can cooperate with an agency like us. We can use our long-term experience and your minimal budget to polish high-quality notes, and then conduct conversion investment for product cards in a way that ensures ROI.

6) Pay attention to the layout of the search scene on Xiaohongshu!!!

Xiaohongshu’s strongest feature at the moment is actually “search”.

But starting from the generation born after the 1990s, Baidu was too old-fashioned and its content was too inaccurate, so people’s mindset towards searching gradually shifted to Xiaohongshu, their life guide.

Xiaohongshu has a structural advantage in search, and other platforms are powerless to compete with it in this regard. Only on Xiaohongshu can you see the "real experiences" posted by "living people."

The value of information is partly timeliness, partly interest, and partly different for different people. What is useless now may be of great use in the future. So when it comes to note results, don’t just focus on the three-day or seven-day cycle, but be clear about the direction and find the core keywords to fight a dull battle. Every little bit counts.

We must make good use of search keywords, hot word recommendations, etc. to help us find the core words of the notes so that the system can recognize and recommend them to the corresponding users.