How Xiaohongshu achieves an elegant and efficient cold start

How to do a cold start on the popular social platform Xiaohongshu? This article analyzes this issue from three aspects: tags, collections, and hot words. Let's take a look!

How to cold start Xiaohongshu? Why are the reading numbers of the first few articles on the account so low? Xiaohongshu has been around for a long time, but the number of fans has not increased. What should I do? …

This question has been asked too many times, this article will definitely help you solve similar problems

1. Label Flow Positioning

For every account that has published content, the platform will label and define the account based on the published content. Some accounts have extremely unstable traffic in the early stage of operation. Most of the reasons are that the subsequent published content does not match the account label, which leads to inaccurate push groups, low interaction indicators, and ultimately affects the recommendation volume.

We can understand it this way: before your account has published any content, the platform does not know what content you will publish. At this time, your account is not associated with any tags, so your first content is crucial and determines how the platform understands and defines your account.

Other public accounts may tell you that you need to "maintain your account" before publishing your first content. You need to spend 5-7 days browsing and interacting with related content, so that your account matches the tag and has a certain weight before publishing content. But in fact, "maintaining your account" is completely self-entertaining and has no basis. Browsing and liking are user behaviors, and user behavior has nothing to do with the traffic power of the account.

After your first piece of content is published, the platform will quickly break it down into countless tags, temporarily locate your line number, and then use the AI ​​system to determine the direction of this content and what kind of people it is suitable for. It will test the click-through rate, interaction rate, reading completion rate and other interactive indicators of the people who may be interested. If the interactive indicators can reach a higher level, it will enter a higher-level traffic pool and continue to receive multiple pushes.

Please note that after the first content is published, your account will already have a positioning and label. If the temporary positioning is not accurate, it will directly affect the recommended traffic of subsequent content. Therefore, before publishing the first content, please be sure to think clearly about the positioning of this account. The more vertical the positioning, the better.

If you don't know how to measure verticality, I'll share a standard with you. It's set by me. It may not be accurate, but it's easy to understand. I set three levels of verticality, the lowest level and the highest level three. For example: if I plan to create a sports account, and the content I post is all related to sports, this belongs to the category of first-level verticality; but if the content I post is more segmented, and I only post content about basketball, this is considered second-level verticality; if I continue to segment and only post content about the NBA or CBA or a certain basketball star, this reaches third-level verticality. The number of fans of a third-level vertical account is not necessarily higher than that of a first-level vertical account. After all, the higher the verticality, the smaller the audience, but the accuracy of fans and the probability of explosive posts are much higher than those of a first-level vertical account, and the value of fans is much higher than that of a first-level vertical account.

Accounts with a high degree of verticality have a very fast cold start. The first few articles have high-quality content, accurate labels, and a good update frequency. Traffic will rise quickly.

2. How to understand inclusion

What is inclusion? Simply put, it means whether the published notes can be seen by users through search. If they are included, users can search for our notes through relevant keywords. If they are not included, they cannot be searched. Therefore, whether they are included determines whether they can get more search traffic.

I guess most Xiaohongshu operators have "inclusion anxiety", but in fact, in my opinion, there is no need to pay too much attention to inclusion. There is probably a kind of Xiaohongshu metaphysics. The more you pay attention to inclusion, the less likely it is to be included. The main reason is that we pay too much attention to inclusion, which leads to the repeated appearance of long-tail words in the content, which is evaluated as malicious marketing and not included.

The more vertical an account is, the easier it is to be included, because the content is more accurate. If the target long-tail word and the account tag and content tag are highly overlapped, it is almost 100% included. Therefore, compared with inclusion, we should pay more attention to whether the tags match. If the tags match, inclusion is natural.

Inclusion is no longer a natural indicator that needs to be paid attention to. With the iteration of the platform mechanism, inclusion will become a thing of the past. Because I have been operating and helping many brands to layout Xiaohongshu traffic, I was fortunate to be invited to the official Xiaohongshu merchant exchange group. Around the end of last year, the official staff revealed a key information that search traffic will be iterated to a thousand-faced mechanism to further enhance anti-marketing capabilities, and the so-called inclusion will become a false proposition

3. Plan hot words in advance and understand them thoroughly

The popularity of a “hot word” involves two factors: the frequency of active searches by users and the popularity of the article itself.

Behind the hot words, it represents the focus of the crowd. When more people search for a certain word, the volume of related content will naturally increase. When more people create content containing this keyword, the word will really become popular. For example, when Apple holds a press conference, various accounts will focus on reporting, and fan users will also actively search for keywords such as "iPhone12". When these two trends rise simultaneously, the related words will become the top of the search list on September 12.

Therefore, hot words can actually be planned in advance, and many hot words are cyclical, such as the picnic hot words in early spring in March and April, the sun protection hot words in July and August, and the first snow hot words in winter. If you can plan ahead before these hot words ferment, you will get the first wave of the hottest traffic and achieve the effect of being in the front position of popular and hot words. Of course, there is a small premise that the planned hot words are strongly related to the account tags. If you plan irrelevant hot words, not only will they not be included in the hot words, but they will also affect the accuracy of the account tags.

Author: Vic

Source: Vic's Marketing Thinking