We actually encountered Xiaohongshu's "low-end business war"

In the field of social media and e-commerce, competition between brands can sometimes become extremely fierce, and even lead to unfair competition. On platforms like Xiaohongshu, some brands may adopt malicious and low-end business war strategies, such as posting negative comments and creating false rankings, to damage the reputation of competitors. Faced with this situation, brands need to adopt effective strategies to protect themselves and maintain a good brand image.

We really should stop engaging in “low-end business wars” on Xiaohongshu.

We didn't expect that this kind of thing would happen to us.

Here's what happened: When we were doing public opinion monitoring on a brand, we found that a competitor was using very low-level methods to smear us. For example, they wrote negative comments about Taobao stores as negative notes and posted them on Xiaohongshu; they made their own industry brand rankings and put our brand at the bottom; they used a large number of accounts to leave negative comments under our related influencer notes, etc.

It can be said that this is a complete drama of "low-end business war".

If you encounter a competitor that continues to engage in "low-end business wars", if you use the same approach as the other party, the final result will only be a lose-lose situation, and no one will benefit.

Therefore, our approach will still be to upgrade the attack dimension, use more endorsements and vertical experts to do reviews and disassembly notes, fully demonstrate the strength of the product, and use hard power to restore the brand's reputation.

After experiencing the helplessness of being maliciously bullied, we have come up with some countermeasures for everyone, so that everyone will not be at a loss when facing such a situation.

1. Pay attention to the volume of voice on the site and do a good job of public opinion monitoring

We have always said that business brands must pay attention to the public opinion monitoring of Xiaohongshu. Xiaohongshu is the last step in consumer decision-making. Every user will use Xiaohongshu to make the final search decision when being attracted by different platforms.

Therefore, if the merchant brand does not do a good job of public opinion monitoring on the site, when users search for the brand, all that comes out is negative information, and naturally the user's desire to consume will be dampened, and the previous marketing will also fail.

So how do we monitor the volume and public opinion within the site?

1) Regularly manually search for brand words, product words or category words . Since the distribution mechanism of Xiaohongshu is different for different people, we cannot guarantee that we will not miss any negative notes through searching. We can only say that it can help us check the top ranking positions of the search page notes to see if there is any negative public opinion that is unfavorable to the brand product.

2) Use third-party public opinion monitoring tools . Brand merchants can use agents to regularly monitor the volume of voice on the site. For example, there is a special public opinion monitoring section on Huitun Sweet Potato, which can help us regularly monitor brand-related public opinion trends. When doing marketing, we should not only pay attention to the data of the delivery, but also pay attention to the post-delivery note maintenance.

Because after we put out the ad notes, it is very likely that some brands will use low-end commercial warfare such as pulling down to intercept our traffic. If we do not monitor regularly, some negative voices will appear and affect the subsequent positive long-tail effect of our grass-planting notes. On Xiaohongshu, the platform that can most influence users' consumption decisions, any negative impact is likely to affect the brand's sales across all channels!

2. How to deal with malicious negative public opinion?

If we have discovered that a competitor has started to post a lot of negative publicity notes, we should not "scold" each other at this time, and we should not create notes to criticize the other party, because such actions will not bring us good results and may even bring us trouble.

So what is the effective and safe way to deal with this situation?

1) Xiaohongshu Official Rights Protection Center submits evidence

First of all, once you find that you are being maliciously dragged down by a competitor, the first thing to do is to preserve the evidence. The more sufficient the evidence, the better. Save the links and specific screenshots.

Then go to the "Xiaohongshu Official Rights Protection Center" and submit evidence for [Defamation of Business Reputation]. Only if the evidence is sufficient, the other party is likely to be punished.

I will directly put the link of "Xiaohongshu Official Rights Protection Center" below, everyone remember to save it!

https://ipp.xiaohongshu.com/mobile

2) Make malicious comments “artificially illegal”

I actually don’t want to tell anyone about this method, as it is indeed not very humane. But since we have personally encountered the “low-end business war”, we no longer have any psychological burden. Your “competitors” may be more “vicious” than you think. At least this will prevent everyone from being at a loss when encountering such a situation of malicious dragging down.

Xiaohongshu has a very low tolerance for data manipulation, because it was removed from the shelves for this reason in the early years, so notes that are manipulated for data manipulation are easily restricted and punished.

All data-brushing websites use the same method. You need to provide a note link and set the quantity. Then the party taking the order will group control a certain number of accounts to like and collect through the "targeted link" you provided.

This method of entering through "directed links" and clicking on a large number of likes and collections is too easy for algorithms to detect, and they will catch it accurately. Therefore, when you place an order, be careful not to place an order for manual likes, but to place the worst quality machine likes.

Of course, not all notes will respond immediately after being refreshed. If the note status does not change after refreshing, find some accounts with different IP addresses to report this note. There is a high probability that the report will be successful. Reporting from multiple accounts with the same IP address will not be very effective!

It is okay to maliciously criticize competitors, but don’t do that with regular notes. Maintaining a healthy community is everyone’s responsibility! Don’t engage in “low-end business wars” unless you have to. There is no end to it…

3) Use word-of-mouth to promote notes with positive word-of-mouth , increase exposure of positive notes, and help improve search page rankings.

If it is a negative public opinion about us caused by competitors, we have no way to directly settle the negative notes, let alone hide the notes and remove them directly. In this case, in addition to the first way of reporting it, we can also try to use word-of-mouth communication to heat up the high-quality tap water notes on the site, accelerate the spread of word-of-mouth and correct the direction of the trend.

But it should be noted here that the heating selection of Word-of-Mouth is not completely customizable. Although we can see the popularity ranking of brand-related tap notes in the Word-of-Mouth toolbar in the Focus background, it still needs to filter the notes by setting specific keywords.

What does it mean? It means that the positive notes you want to heat up are not necessarily the notes that can be selected in the word-of-mouth system. Merchants can only select "notes that meet the requirements" for heating through the system's intelligent search. This means that the idea of ​​many business friends that "we can just produce a lot of tap water notes ourselves, and then heat them up" is not feasible! And this method is too expensive. If there is no other way, brand merchants should try not to use this method.

3. Do a good job of content management to reduce potential risks and avoid potential risks

In our daily content, we need to embed some core keywords such as brands and products in the grass-planting notes we put out, predict the possible public opinions in advance, and sort out some treatment plans and public relations words according to the types of public opinions.

For example, for sensitive skin care products, people often use titles and covers that may be criticized in their notes. When you start to write such notes, it is inevitable that your products may also be criticized by other competing brands, and it is difficult for you to deal with it in a strong way.

Pre-embed keywords. We have said before that before our brand products have gained a certain level of popularity, we not only need to use some scene keywords or function keywords that users are interested in in our grass-planting notes, but also need to pre-embed some core keywords in the content and comment areas so that target users can search for them. When the most accurate users search for the target keywords, they can be matched by our content.

Especially the content from some reported and endorsed influencers will make users feel that "it turns out so many influencers have been using it for a long time, I've discovered a treasure product". In this way, even if there are competing products or some other types of negative public opinions in the later stage, we can still gain the upper hand in public opinion through some positive delivery, plus pre-buried keywords and endorsement content.

Final Thoughts

Finally, I call on my colleagues at Xiaohongshu to pay attention to the solution to the malicious slander of competitors!

At present, it is still difficult to protect the rights of brands whose reputation is damaged, and the punishment is not severe enough. The authorities certainly do not want this kind of "low-end business war" to continue to happen on Xiaohongshu, so please pay attention to it and put corresponding rules and punishment methods online for this situation!