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In the content race, Douyin is the largest, but Xiaohongshu has still carved out a path and maintained sustained growth. The core reason: misaligned competition. Xiaohongshu does not do what Douyin does well, but instead makes breakthroughs and innovations in its areas of strength. This principle is very simple and is the most basic marketing concept. Is there anyone who doesn’t understand it? Knowing is easier said than done. Let me tell you a true story. When I first joined Kuaishou, I was often asked: Why is this account so popular on Douyin, but so few on our platform? This meme has exploded on Douyin, but there is no news on our platform? My first reaction was: What does this have to do with us? Why should we answer such questions? If the same content has good effects on both sides, it will be the worst result for Kuaishou. The opponent is twice the size of Kuaishou. If the content and e-commerce ecosystem are still very similar, Kuaishou will be swallowed up by Douyin. Now, Kuaishou is doing well, which just proves that Kuaishou has a differentiated advantage that cannot be eroded by Douyin. Recognize your own advantages, constantly break through and innovate, and have a place in the competition. Xiaohongshu is very determined to compete with Douyin in three aspects: content, advertising and e-commerce. 1. Content: Pictures and texts are advantages, videos are defense Xiaohongshu’s advantage is its pictures and texts, which come from native content creators with good aesthetic abilities. Why is this an advantage? Can't creators be poached? First of all, these native "book lovers" truly love this community and identify with the community's values, so they are difficult to poach. Secondly, even if their content is poached or moved, it is difficult for it to become popular outside of Xiaohongshu because the content has a strong Xiaohongshu imprint and cannot be transplanted. Therefore, even in the tide of short videos, pictures and texts still have a solid position in Xiaohongshu. So, what is the role of video? The video is used to counter the competition from TikTok, and its main purpose is defense. Because Xiaohongshu users also have the need and habit to watch videos, this is a big trend. If you don’t have this type of content on your platform, you will lose the time of these users. When it comes to content forms like videos, Xiaohongshu looks at them based on different scenarios. 1) Videos distributed on the discovery page are defined as a type of content. They can meet users’ content consumption needs and should be done well. 2) After entering the video details page from the discovery page, swipe up and down to swipe the video, entering a mode similar to TikTok, which is defined as guessing what you might like, and is a defensive measure. 3) Adding a video column to the bottom navigation is purely defensive and will be very cautious. It is said that it has been AB for a long time and has not been fully promoted. Xiaohongshu’s attitude towards pictures, texts and videos clearly reflects the idea of staggered competition. I didn’t simply think that because Douyin short videos are good, I should fully participate in the competition. I also didn’t throw away my own advantages and follow others. 2. Advertising: Planting grass is an advantage, performance advertising is a disadvantage Internet advertising can be divided into brand advertising on portals, performance advertising in searches and information flows, and grass-roots advertising on Xiaohongshu. The first two types of advertisements are defined by product types, and grass-planting advertisements refer specifically to Xiaohongshu. This is the advantage of Xiaohongshu. There is a budget pyramid model inside Xiaohongshu, with brand advertising at the top, seeding advertising in the middle, and performance advertising at the bottom. Among them, performance advertising is the largest, and it is also what products like Douyin, which have advantages in scale and efficiency, are better at. As a community product, it is difficult for Xiaohongshu to compete with Douyin in performance advertising. Therefore, we need to compete in a different way and maximize the use of grass-planting advertising. This idea is absolutely correct. The difficulty lies in how to define the effect of planting grass. In the early days, Xiaohongshu used CPE to calculate, which was obviously unreasonable. Later, the solution was CPI, where I stands for interest, which means paying by interest. Once this indicator is given, the exposure and cost can be calculated forward, and the cost of conversion transactions can be calculated backward. Such indicators should be viewed on a per-industry basis and are difficult to be applied to all scenarios, so a process of continuous exploration of balance is needed. But no matter what, Xiaohongshu has the right to define, and brands also have this demand. In summary, although performance advertising is the largest in scale, Douyin and Hongshu are weak after all, so the focus is on grass-planting advertising, which is also consistent with the overall community positioning. 3. E-commerce: Buyers are an advantage, big anchors are a disadvantage When doing e-commerce, the supply of goods is the most important. On platforms like Xiaohongshu and Douyin, the supplier of goods is the e-commerce anchors and the supply chain behind them. Douyin and Kuaishou have been playing the live e-commerce game for several years and have mastered it thoroughly. If Xiaohongshu tries to do it again in a similar way to Douyin and Kuaishou, it will surely fail. Xiaohongshu thinks this way: merchants are divided into four quadrants, with the horizontal axis being content capabilities and the vertical axis being product capabilities. The best choice is a business that has both content and products. But this category is too large, for example, many big anchors or big brands are included. But the current Xiaohongshu cannot satisfy the big anchors and cannot feed them well. So within this quadrant, we can make another cut and separate the group into “buyers”. They are very good at creating content on Xiaohongshu, and some are even the authors of the books themselves. At the same time, they have goods, which are mostly non-standard products and rely on product selection capabilities. Buyers are particularly suitable for Xiaohongshu, which is to find a group of people who can sell goods from the community. It is a win-win choice that not only does e-commerce work, but also does not hurt the feelings of users in the community. This group is large in size, but their sales and supply chain capabilities are relatively weak. They will definitely not be able to survive on Douyin, so Xiaohongshu is a good choice. Is the misaligned competition like Xiaohongshu a perfect choice? 1) The best solution to current competition Douyin and other companies are there, and if Xiaohongshu wants to find a suitable position for itself, it must consider its competitors, so this is a reference to the strategic choices they have made. 2) Misaligned competition is essentially a trade-off All the Xiaohongshu strategies mentioned above focus on describing the reasonable side, but in essence there are losses, or in other words, there are trade-offs. For example, most of the misaligned competition decisions I have seen made by Xiaohongshu cannot lead to rapid growth. When company managers think about this issue, they don't place scale at a high priority. 3) Disadvantages are relative and do not mean that you do not want to do well. The disadvantages mentioned above are only relative to Douyin, not absolutely bad. And it does not mean that the company accepts the long-term existence of disadvantages, but only temporarily. |
