6000-word article analyzing the operation trend of Xiaohongshu in 2024

In order to gain traffic on the Xiaohongshu platform and realize commercialization, it is necessary to understand the operating trends of Xiaohongshu. Based on his own work experience, the author sorted out the needs and trends of Xiaohongshu and came up with 7 directions for the operation of Xiaohongshu in 2024 for your reference.

For all creators who want to gain traffic, influence, and monetization results on Xiaohongshu, perhaps we need to understand the Xiaohongshu ecosystem and our own position in it in order to better and continuously get the desired results.

I have been studying Xiaohongshu for a year. I have created content about local dating that attracted more than 600 visitors a week, created an original hit model that received tens of millions of views, and created a thousand-follower account that monetized over 10,000 yuan... I hope that I can help more people achieve some good results in 2024, because I believe that in 2024, Xiaohongshu will still be one of the best platforms for ordinary people and individual content entrepreneurs.

In order to better understand Xiaohongshu, I spent some time looking up information. Combining my 10 years of experience in marketing and self-media operations, I sorted out the needs and trends of Xiaohongshu, and came up with 7 directions for Xiaohongshu's operations in 2024 for your reference.

If you have any different opinions or ideas, please feel free to communicate and make progress together~

The essence of Xiaohongshu is a platform

The essence of Xiaohongshu is a platform. No matter how new a community it is, it is still a platform in the final analysis. For a platform, there are only two core key points: acquiring traffic and commercial monetization.

Traffic refers to users. Xiaohongshu is a content platform, and its users include creators and viewers. We are creators among Xiaohongshu users. Our position and role in the Xiaohongshu ecosystem are as shown in the figure:

Creators are an important part of Xiaohongshu's traffic and commercialization as a content community. The exchange of interests between creators and the platform also revolves around these two points:

In terms of traffic, the platform can acquire new audiences by leveraging the content produced by creators, and retain audiences by allowing them to watch content.

Creators attract the attention of audiences on the platform and gain influence on the platform by publishing content on the platform.

In terms of commercialization, the platform guides creators to share good products and strategies, helping merchants sell goods and gain commercial monetization capabilities.

Creators earn income by promoting products or promoting brands.

The following content will revolve around Xiaohongshu’s traffic and commercialization in 2024.

At the same time, with Douyin grabbing market share in front and Video Account holding the majority of WeChat in the back, Xiaohongshu needs to carve out its own path in terms of traffic and monetization. It must rely on its long-standing differentiation, so the differences of Xiaohongshu will be discussed separately.

This article outlines:

1. Traffic-Xiaohongshu's breakthrough and crowd focus
2. Business-Xiaohongshu Commercialization Acceleration and Innovation
3. Different-Xiaohongshu’s differentiation
4. Revelation - Revelation of Xiaohongshu Operation in 2024

1. Xiaohongshu’s Breakthrough and Crowd Focus

In the promotion cycle of a brand or product, there are generally two stages:

• In the first stage, the business model is not formed yet, and the brand will seek growth, but the investment is relatively restrained. Traffic will expire. Traffic from three months ago needs to be nurtured again for commercial conversion three months later, and the cost is not much lower than acquiring new traffic;
• In the second stage, once the business model has taken shape and its results have been verified, investment in traffic growth will increase, because at this point, the traffic can be converted and not wasted.

In 2023, Xiaohongshu's buyers made a major breakthrough, with a single-game GMV exceeding 100 million, and a list of top 100 buyers was released, and the sales data was not bad.

At that time, I thought that Xiaohongshu would take bigger actions to acquire traffic.

Sure enough, in December, Xiaohongshu officially announced its cooperation with the Spring Festival Gala of the Year of the Dragon, and jointly built a live broadcast room "Everyone's Spring Festival Gala" next to the central radio station, with a total exposure of 1 billion, over 170 million interactions, and nearly 1.3 billion readings of the topic #大家的春节#.

The Spring Festival Gala is a huge traffic pool that can help Xiaohongshu gain traffic faster.

After the Spring Festival, Xiaohongshu teamed up with 8 national chain brands, covering more than 40,000 stores in 356 cities, to give away milk tea, with 35 million people participating.

Here we can notice the key point: while Xiaohongshu is exploring ways to break through the circle of traffic, it is still focusing on young people.

As Xiaohongshu's traffic breaks out of the circle, more and more competitors are entering this former "traffic depression". At the same time, more brand merchants are coming in to share the traffic. Whether Xiaohongshu can continue to perform well depends on: the platform's monthly active growth, the user's usage time, and whether it can meet the traffic needs of a large number of new creators?

After all, according to many KOLs and the statements of many operating websites, Xiaohongshu is still the most worthwhile platform in 2024. I have also noticed that more and more people around me have the New Year’s plan of creating a Xiaohongshu account.

So, the realistic question remains: Can the platform's monthly active growth and users' usage time meet the traffic demands of a large influx of new creators?

I have not found the monthly active data of Xiaohongshu after the third quarter of 2023. The monthly active users announced at that time were 260 million. During the same period, the monthly active users of Douyin were about 700 million. Judging from this data alone, Xiaohongshu still has a large room for traffic growth. However, this also means the generalization of the population: a large base of traffic means a full influx of people of all ages and different levels of the market, but this may be contrary to the community atmosphere that Xiaohongshu wants to create.

At this crossroads, traffic scale and community quality actually become a multiple-choice question.

Judging from the tenth anniversary sharing of Xiaohongshu CEO Seiya and the interview of COO Conan at Geek Park, Xiaohongshu will choose community texture.

Therefore, we can infer that although Xiaohongshu is trying to break through the circle of traffic, it will not be too fast, so the traffic on the platform is becoming more and more precious.

Therefore, as a creator, you can feel that the probability of Xiaohongshu's hit is getting lower.

At the same time, judging from the basic traffic of published content, the content weight of Xiaohongshu is far greater than the account weight. Many newcomers with dozens or hundreds of fans can get thousands or even tens of thousands of likes for their posts, while many bloggers with hundreds of thousands of fans may only get a dozen likes. Therefore, Xiaohongshu is still friendly to newcomers.

However, the average traffic allocated to creators will decrease, the probability of a hit product will decrease, and the influence of account weight will be weaker, which also means that Xiaohongshu accounts will start to become worthless.

If you are running Xiaohongshu, and your main method of monetization is still through advertising, then you will be under increasing pressure, because brands will value the stability of your data when placing advertisements. However, on Xiaohongshu, where traffic has become scarce and account weight and influence are small, it will become more difficult to maintain the stability of account data.

Moreover, Xiaohongshu has more obscure rules than other platforms, including account blocking, traffic restrictions, and post deletion. Sometimes, if you accidentally step into a trap, your account will be gone.

Therefore, those who really know how to make money no longer focus on the number of fans and likes on Xiaohongshu, but on the GMV and traffic data of the goods.

When you are working on Xiaohongshu in 2024, don’t think about how many followers you will gain or how many advertisements you will take. Instead, sell products, attract traffic, do things that can make money directly, and do things to accumulate your own private domain.

2. Business: Xiaohongshu's commercialization acceleration and innovation

If you check the Xiaohongshu Creator Center, you will find that among the 30 courses in the Xiaohongshu Creation Service Center, there are 13 courses directly related to "commercial promotion", and the top courses are the online notifications of the Business Cooperation Center.

It can be seen that Xiaohongshu is still mainly promoting commercial promotion in terms of commercial monetization in the near future.

What is commercial promotion on Xiaohongshu?

In the Cooperation Center, we can see that the three commercial seeding cooperation methods currently promoted by Xiaohongshu are:

• Blogger cooperation can be understood as advertising placement cooperation. The brand publishes recruitment needs and content budget, and the blogger makes a cooperation appointment. The settlement method is to buy out a single piece of content, which is often called "taking over the advertisement".
• Buyer cooperation is Xiaohongshu's product promotion cooperation, including product promotion through notes and live streaming. The platform currently mainly promotes product promotion through live streaming. Bloggers can select products for promotion in the product selection center, and brands can also invite bloggers to promote products. The difference between the two is mainly the difference in commission ratio.
• Store exploration cooperation is Xiaohongshu's exploration of local life. By exploring local stores and publishing content, you can obtain traffic support and commission sharing.

The functions that have been launched on the platform are the current situation. The future trends may be seen in the speeches of senior executives. I read the speeches and interviews of Xiaohongshu CEO Seiya and COO on the occasion of Xiaohongshu’s tenth anniversary, and found that in terms of commercialization, Xiaohongshu may want to:

1. Diversified business formats

Xiaohongshu’s own definition of “planting grass” is to reach and influence users with high-quality content.

Indeed, Xiaohongshu has more genes for content e-commerce than Douyin and Bilibili: in 2013, the 1.0 version of Xiaohongshu was a shopping guide document for 7 countries, and "shopping guide" is naturally strongly related to "e-commerce".

Later, the community launched was the "Overseas Shopping Sharing Community". It can be seen that Xiaohongshu was established for lifestyle sharing and commercial shopping.

On December 22, Xiaohongshu held the will business conference and proposed that "everything can be promoted", further expanding the scope of promotion, not only limited to consumer goods, but also including services, experiences, virtual content, and even personal IP promotion.

This concept is somewhat similar to the "omnipotent Taobao" of the past, which also packages a variety of business formats. However, Taobao's pure e-commerce attributes make it weak in local life, virtual content, personal IP, and bulk commodity trading.

Can the content e-commerce model created by Xiaohongshu break through this limitation? I think this is also what Xiaohongshu is exploring and has achieved initial results.

For the platform, business is a realistic game. It is not enough to simply "want diversified business formats". It needs to create successful models, attract practitioners to settle in and stay, achieve a certain GMV, and form a certain industry settlement scale before it can become a "business format".

Therefore, Xiaohongshu will pay attention to the commercialization of other formats besides consumer goods. Of course, this is a gradual process:

• First of all, it is to accelerate the maturity of the consumer product commercialization format, which can become the cornerstone of Xiaohongshu's commercialization. After this cornerstone is established, it can explore other commercialization methods more calmly. Therefore, in 2024, the form of buyer live broadcast will still be encouraged by the platform, and Xiaohongshu buyer live broadcast is still worth entering, but competitors are pouring in quickly, so you have to act quickly.
• Secondly, it is about incubating new industries. Xiaohongshu defines its commercial differentiation point as "special groups and high-quality seeding", so incubating new industries is what Xiaohongshu is happy to do, which can better highlight the differentiation of Xiaohongshu from other platforms such as Douyin and Video Account. Xiaohongshu is a "face control" and "quality life" platform, so young people like the visual emerging industries with a sense of quality, and there are opportunities on Xiaohongshu. Visualization refers to what can be presented intuitively through pictures and videos, such as original design clothing of the new national style, customized pet felt, etc., and opportunities can be found in foreign communities or websites with the same style such as ins.
• The third is the commercial exploration of local life, that is, the services and experiences included in "everything can be promoted". Douyin started to engage in local life two years earlier than Xiaohongshu in promoting the commercialization of this format. However, the store exploration content on Xiaohongshu was very popular a few years ago, and many bloggers who share lifestyles also have the advantage of sharing store exploration. Therefore, Xiaohongshu has its own advantages in this area, and the store exploration cooperation on Xiaohongshu is worth paying attention to.
• As for virtual content, there are currently many people on Xiaohongshu who make money by selling information and wallpapers. I have not seen any official support for the time being, but there should be corresponding actions after the previous business models are basically explored and taken shape.

As for the promotion of personal IP, I will leave it as a question mark for now and discuss it in detail in Part 4, Xiaohongshu’s differentiated decentralization.

2. Commercialization of search

In an interview with Xiaohongshu COO Conan at Geek Park, Conan mentioned a very interesting statistic: 70% of monthly active users search on Xiaohongshu, and 30% of monthly active users search as the first thing they do when they open Xiaohongshu. Many new users also come into contact with Xiaohongshu because of search.

Xiaohongshu, which wants to retain new users, will certainly pay attention to the optimization of search traffic. Conan also mentioned that in the future, Xiaohongshu may pay more attention to the commercial value of search and the user value of search content in retaining users on the platform, which means that the search ranking may change in the future:

01. The ability of content to bring goods will become a more important basis for content search ranking, which is the commercial value of search;

02. The authenticity and differentiation of content will also become important bases for search rankings, which is the user value of search.

Therefore, when creators promote products through content on Xiaohongshu, they can pay more attention to the search traffic of Xiaohongshu:

• Keyword layout of the content, using vertically segmented keywords in the title, opening, topic, and cover text;
• Pay attention to optimizing the data indicators of the content that brings in goods;
• The content is more lifelike, realistic, and detailed, such as these examples:

3. Interaction and repurchase

In addition to the increase in the number of transactions, Conan also mentioned that he hopes to help merchants operate in the long term.

From the perspective of brand management, long-term management includes: establishing brand image (image), interaction between brand and users (voice), experience and repeat purchase (sales volume), among which the most critical ones are actually interaction and repeat purchase.

In terms of interaction, Xiaohongshu has already established good model cases: the modified Wuling Hongguang mini, the Yan'an Apple that listened to advice...

But at the repurchase level, there are some bugs:

• For high-order or small studios, they all hope to bring customers into the private domain so that they don’t have to pay high commissions repeatedly;
• For fast-moving consumer goods such as clothing and beverages, users are accustomed to purchasing from places with discounts, and low order values ​​are not what Xiaohongshu wants to achieve.

So I personally am not optimistic about this area.

In addition, although Xiaohongshu’s commercialization exploration is accelerating compared to two years ago, I believe it will still maintain a cautious attitude and will not move too fast.

In August last year, Xiaohongshu CEO Seiya proposed in an internal sharing that commercial value is not based on efficiency improvement, but liberal arts, allowing the art part to create greater commercial value. Therefore, quality and high customer orders will still be Xiaohongshu's future pursuit.

3. Difference: Xiaohongshu’s differentiation

Xiaohongshu’s official account has only one sentence introduction: authentic, positive, and diverse. I think this is the most authentic summary of the platform’s tone by Xiaohongshu’s official officials.

In the "Xiaohongshu 2023 Annual Trends" officially released by Xiaohongshu in December, there is such a summary:

These trends do not come from market education by opinion leaders, nor are they short-lived hot trends. Rather, they are the result of Xiaohongshu’s increasingly diverse users inspiring each other’s passion for exploring life, allowing new trends to continue to break through the circle, constantly attract new audiences, and gradually become a lifestyle that more people can feel and understand.

Behind the diversity is Xiaohongshu's resolute implementation.

1. Decentralization

There are three reasons for this conclusion:

• From the operational experience, Xiaohongshu’s account weight is currently the lowest among all platforms, and the probability of amateur accounts becoming popular is also the highest among all platforms;
• The number of fans and influencers of Xiaohongshu's top influencers is smaller than that of other platforms;
• Xiaohongshu will not create gods, but will attract people who are interested in something through a group of people who do something. Take the recent creation of a benchmark for live-streaming buyers as an example. From Dong Jie, to Yi Nengjing, Zhang Xiaohui, to the list of top 100 buyers, Xiaohongshu prefers to put its eggs in many baskets instead of piling them into one basket all the time.

Conan also said that Xiaohongshu wants to grow into a large community and serve more users, but it is a fusion of small communities and small circles. Small communities and small circles mean that big IP is not needed.

For content platforms, they need to set up some benchmarks to attract everyone to come in and create, but Xiaohongshu does not want to rely on these benchmarks. Instead, it hopes that these benchmarks can be replaced at any time so that it will not face the loss of traffic due to the loss of bloggers.

Balancing the interests between platforms and bloggers has always been a practical issue. People flock to Xiaohongshu because it has a good atmosphere and good content. However, once the people who provide the atmosphere and content lose the motivation to continue creating, and newcomers are attracted by other better platforms, it is easy for them to disperse.

Therefore, my opinion on the "IP planting" in the "diversified business formats" is that Xiaohongshu welcomes IP, but will not allow IP to become too big.

This is not a bad thing for ordinary people who do not necessarily need to become a national IP, but can achieve career freedom by attracting 1,000 loyal fans.

Since Xiaohongshu has chosen to decentralize, it will continue to release traffic to new accounts, allowing newcomers to taste the sweetness as soon as possible and have the motivation to continue to come in.

So my judgment is that newcomers will have opportunities for a relatively long period of time in the future.

At the same time, we must once again emphasize that on Xiaohongshu, the ultimate goal should not be to maintain an account and accept advertisements, but to sell goods and attract traffic. The serious goal is to make money as soon as possible and get the money or people in your hands.

2. Live an active life

The entry point for Xiaohongshu’s content is sharing lifestyles, because it is more closely related to life and has a higher possibility of commercialization.

Xiaohongshu defines itself as a "warm little community" and the mainstream atmosphere of the community is: cherish your current life and work hard for it. We can see that even though many people who "lay down at a young age" and "those born in 1997 retired early" seem to be decadent, they are actually still positive about life and want to break the status quo and find a better self.

Therefore, on Xiaohongshu, the more popular shared content is warm, positive, and shares beautiful details, rather than conflicts and negative emotions. This is also what creators need to pay attention to when creating content on Xiaohongshu.

4. Summary: Xiaohongshu is still worth doing in 2024

Through analysis and sorting, we have come up with seven directions for Xiaohongshu's operations in 2024. Let's summarize:

1. There is still a chance for new accounts to enter the game

And there will be opportunities for a long time to come.

Although videos and live broadcasts are dividing the traffic, unlike other platforms, Xiaohongshu’s pictures and texts are still its characteristics. It has many low-follower hot-selling products and the creation cost is low, so for new creators, Xiaohongshu is still one of the best platforms to enter.

2. Don’t pursue followers, do things that are closer to money

When you are using Xiaohongshu in 2024, don’t think about how many followers you will gain or how many advertisements you will take. Instead, sell products, attract traffic, do things that can make money directly, and do things to accumulate your own private domain.

3. Live streaming is worth a try

4. Personal brands with a visual and high-quality feel can consider using Xiaohongshu as the main promotion platform

5. Pay attention to search traffic and do a good job of keyword layout

6. Pay attention to Xiaohongshu’s localization and store exploration activities

7. Content attributes: warmth, details, and life-like

The above content is all macro-level thinking. After working in self-media for several years, I have a big feeling: I have read a lot of macro and methodological things, but when it comes to details, it is still easy to be confused and I don’t know what to do.

Therefore, I will also periodically analyze the recent data performance of highly active bloggers, or recent hot titles, so that I can better grasp the micro details and know how to do it specifically. If you are interested, you can pay attention to my subsequent sharing, and cheer together~

References:

"Xiaohongshu e-commerce 2023 annual list released!"

"Xiaohongshu "creates" tens of millions of buyers"

Xiaohongshu 2023 Annual Trend Report

Xiaohongshu COO Conan: Good communities give rise to good businesses, and communities and businesses are not in opposition or contradiction

Xiaohongshu CEO Seiya shares his views on the 10th anniversary: ​​Technology is the pen and humanities is the ink to create a broad and warm community

Author: Li Zimu talks about operations, public account: Li Zimu talks about operations