“Looking for a partner” trend is rising on Xiaohongshu

Dazi, a new type of social relationship, is shallower than friends but more than colleagues. It focuses on precise companionship in a vertical niche field and can be said to be a substitute for intimate relationships. The trend of "looking for a partner" has taken off on Xiaohongshu, and the Dazi culture has more than one connection with Xiaohongshu. This article analyzes the connection. Let's take a look.

Recently, the culture of hooking up has become very popular on the Internet.

A partner is a new type of social relationship that focuses on precise companionship in vertical fields. According to different personal needs, it can be subdivided into work partners who are "online at any time and lose contact after work", toilet partners who "use the toilet with pay, in pairs", and dining partners who "have similar tastes and go to the cafeteria together".

During the May Day travel period, many people posted on social platforms, looking for travel partners to travel with.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

There is no doubt that partners, a relationship between close friends and strangers connected by interests, has become the "new favorite" of young people .

On Douyin, the topic #饭伴子 received 5.95 billion views, and #游戏伴子 received 4.62 billion views, with the huge traffic volume being eye-catching.

On the "trend distribution center" Xiaohongshu, "looking for a dinner partner to go on a blind date" became a hot search on the platform. User @小小星屑 "opened up her mind" on Xiaohongshu: just think of having a new dinner partner, go to explore restaurants with the dinner partner, and unlock a restaurant that she has always wanted to go but has never been to. In her notes, she detailed the precautions before, during and after the blind date, which received 12,000 likes.

At the same time, Xiaohongshu has also set off a wave of online "looking for partners", with users writing down the "professional partners" they need, expanding their own circle of friends beyond traditional social interactions with acquaintances.

Behind the prevalence of “hookup culture”, does it reflect Xiaohongshu’s new approach to social interaction?

01 Find a partner on Xiaohongshu

"I don't know if it's because my nap partner is back, but I fell asleep more easily today, and I didn't feel a headache lying down like before."

On Xiaohongshu, @洋洋子爱摸鱼 posted a photo of her and her nap partner, sleeping soundly on a mat about 1 meter wide, covered with a blanket on the office floor. The existence of the nap partner makes the nap time in the office instantly warm and natural.

Of course, some people gain partners and some lose partners. After her dining partner at work resigned, @芭蕉女士 posted on Xiaohongshu to express her pain, but her screams of “Swallow, can you not leave?” and “How can I live without you, Swallow?” did not bring the other person back.

Xiaohongshu blogger @洋洋子爱摸鱼, @芭蕉女士

Hooking up is gradually becoming a new social trend .

The young people who choose to burn incense between going to work and making progress, the young people who choose to be funny between making money and finding a partner, and the young people who choose to be friends between strangers and close friends.

Data from the DT Research Institute shows that more than half of the people have at least one partner, and more than half of them want to have a partner. Only 4.2% of the total population explicitly refuses to socialize with partners.

At the same time, the qualities that people value most in a partner are similar interests, being easy to get along with and being generous, which can be called the "three virtues" of a partner and also reflect the relationship needs of contemporary young people.

When existing interpersonal relationships are not enough to meet your social needs, it is particularly important to find a partner who shares the same interests as you.

On Xiaohongshu, you can also find many notes about "looking for a partner" . In a note about looking for a "weekend partner", blogger @-ZQ. detailed her interests and hobbies and her need for a "partner". For her, she is looking for a partner because "I have a lot of ideas but not many of them have come true, and my friends are all working and dating, so we don't always get together."

"Dating", a "light relationship" between a stranger and a close friend, can fully meet her needs.

In addition, there are "reading partners", where the blogger hopes that two people can encourage each other and give each other different insights and thoughts, "hug partners", where the blogger hopes to relieve anxiety through hugs, and "photography partners", where the blogger hopes to find beautiful mountains and rivers to take photos together and improve each other's portrait skills...

Whether they are a substitute or a purified version of intimate relationships, these notes carry the curiosity and expectations of young people about expanding their social circles, and there is no shortage of people raising their hands to sign up in the comment section.

On Xiaohongshu, there are many notes sharing the happy experience of finding like-minded partners. After successfully finding a travel partner to travel with, user @滚滚要减肥 posted his experience of a half-day trip to the zoo + showing off his fans, detailing his happiness after "successfully forming a team".

This kind of social relationship that does not require daily maintenance and only satisfies each other's needs has its charm.

Xiaohongshu users @滚滚要输瘦, @-ZQ.

Xu Zhong also had the same experience. Before this, Xiaohongshu had pushed some MBTI-related analysis and meme pictures to her.

While browsing Xiaohongshu, she accidentally saw an "INTP dating" post. The other party was not in the same city as her, but their interests and hobbies overlapped.

After leaving a message on this note, she quickly received a reply from the other party. Soon after, the two sides moved their chat battlefield to WeChat, and they both felt that they had a high degree of compatibility in the chat. "To some extent, I found another me in the world."

Of course, “finding a partner” is not without risks. Short-term and fast social interactions may result in “disposable” friendships or precise “mines” during travel.

Image source: Xiaohongshu users @加油鸭, @Lillian笔记

On Xiaohongshu, a user posted a warning "Don't believe posts looking for chat partners" and listed all the strange things she encountered when looking for chat partners, including but not limited to chat partners asking for photos of themselves without makeup and posting just to increase the popularity of their own accounts.

Even the most carefully selected partners can be disappointing.

Those who "seek partners" who thought that their desire to express and confide would be fully accepted by the other party, only discovered after actually adding the other party as a friend that this type of social interaction itself is like "opening a blind box". The high-quality chats they expected always ended with the other party almost not replying to their messages. They then realized that "I will never look for chat partners again" and "It's too exhausting to wait for chat partners to reply to messages every day", and decided to shift the focus of their lives back to themselves.

02 Young people are looking for partners, and their main base is Xiaohongshu

This doesn’t seem to be the first time that Xiaohongshu has demonstrated its social potential.

Outdoor sports may be one of the first contents to reap the benefits of social media.

Previously, Xiaohongshu was known as a hub for trendy culture. Frisbee and camping, which were once popular among young people, originated from Xiaohongshu.

Take frisbee as an example. This sport, which is not very popular, has seen a significant increase in the number of people after attracting a large number of trendy men and women to check in and experience it. In the later period, with the support of professional competitions and clubs on the platform, it has gradually become a trend among the whole people.

At present, Xiaohongshu is still the most active platform for frisbee sports. Under related topics, many people directly link it with social networking. Especially after being linked with "making friends in the same city", this sport has quickly expanded and evolved into a trendy social method.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

Nowadays, "partner culture" is very popular on Xiaohongshu, and there are many notes with the topic of "finding partners", looking for "allies" for outdoor activities such as frisbee, camping, and hiking.

In essence, this has become a new way of socializing for young people . These notes often carry labels such as "making friends in the same city" and "where to go on XX weekend". When searching for keywords in Xiaohongshu, the topic of "making friends in Beijing" has received over 93 million views, which shows the social genes of the platform.

The "partner culture" has given young people a breakthrough in social networking on Xiaohongshu.

What’s even more interesting is that these social behaviors may not be the result of intentional guidance by the authorities, but rather are more spontaneously generated based on the platform ecology, and then the authorities use traffic to help the content section grow rapidly.

Why Xiaohongshu?

Kas believes that Xiaohongshu follows a path of "using content to drive social interaction and using social interaction to drive consumption". The platform's authentic sharing atmosphere, low threshold for pictures and texts, and users' strong willingness to share have jointly created Xiaohongshu's social potential.

In essence, Xiaohongshu is still a comprehensive content exchange community based on UGC, and users' individual experience sharing and shopping guides almost account for half of the content on the site.

As the platform covers more dimensions of life, "sharing" and "authenticity" have become the core keywords for Xiaohongshu to build itself in recent years.

In a conversation with Liu Qing, Xiaohongshu COO Conan said, "Many platforms are more about recording and self-expression, but we focused on sharing. Sharing must be in the hope of helping others, and encouraging sharing itself also creates a community atmosphere that makes everyone more willing to share."

Xiaohongshu is well aware of the behavior logic of users. When individual experience is not enough to support a certain action, people often refer to the opinions of others, and such content is everywhere on Xiaohongshu, such as question posts and strategy posts on the platform. At the same time, Xiaohongshu's community culture is divided by interests and hobbies. When interests become an important link in the relationship, social interaction is naturally formed.

On Xiaohongshu, making appointments for photos, finding partners, making tea around the fire, making appointments for cat feeding at home, and even finding a cosplayer to play the role of a boyfriend are all actual social behaviors that occur between users.

Of course, Xiaohongshu is not the only one that is making efforts in social networking.

In the era of competing for existing users, content platforms are trying every means to strengthen social interaction and use social closed loops to keep users on the platform. Among these, how to design user interaction has become a problem that ambitious platforms must solve.

Building towards a lifestyle may be one of the common directions of content platforms . For example, Kuaishou’s slogan is “Embrace every kind of life”, Douyin’s is “Record a beautiful life”, and Xiaohongshu’s slogan has shifted from “Good things from abroad” to “Mark my life”.

Douyin’s trial of social networking began in 2017. At the "Toutiao Creator Conference", Zhang Yiming announced that it would move from "intelligent recommendation" to "intelligent social networking."

In the following years, Douyin made many moves to explore social networking, such as launching off-site APPs "Duoshan" and "Feiliao", but both were taken off the shelves. In 2019, Douyin began to test the group chat section within the site, and has since tested a number of functions around making friends, such as live voice dating, connections, video calls, watching videos together, circles in the same city, friends, daily life, etc.

In comparison, Xiaohongshu has more potential and advantages in social networking, but how to direct users' spontaneous behaviors into the right place is a question that Xiaohongshu needs to think about.

Last October, Xiaohongshu launched an internal test of a new feature called “Voice Live”, which focuses on voice social interaction. Users can create public rooms and discuss many topics of interest with strangers.

From a functional point of view, it can be regarded as the Xiaohongshu version of the voice chat room, and its purpose is to enhance users' social behavior.

In February this year, after several rounds of internal testing, the platform launched the "group chat" function, continuing to break the reality-based social model of acquaintances and connecting strangers with interests and hobbies.

In the group chat square, users can select the content they are interested in and click to apply to join. Currently, the creators of group chats include brands, merchants, vertical experts, and amateur bloggers.

At the same time, in order to socialize with close friends, Xiaohongshu has also launched the "Xiu Xiu" function to receive photos shared by friends.

Xiaohongshu Group Chat Plaza

However, in order to truly reap the "social" dividend, Xiaohongshu still has many issues to explore.

Author: Chao Guan

Source: WeChat public account: "CaasData (ID:caasdata6)"