Xiaohongshu and the “New Emily”

With the rise of social media, personal influence has gradually become a manifestation of commercial value. From the Internet celebrity phenomenon of "Emily in Paris" to the "lifestyle e-commerce" of Xiaohongshu, we have seen a new business model driven by personal narratives.

Wang Wei's American TV series "Emily in Paris" has such a portrayal. Emily, a marketer, was sent to Paris by the company to work. She began to post photos of her life as an American in Paris, France and related textual thoughts on social media, which attracted a lot of attention and discussion. Even the wife of the French president agreed with her views on the masculine and feminine of a certain word in French (French nouns need to distinguish between masculine and feminine). As she continued to live and work in Paris, her usual work content was to connect Internet celebrities and brands. She also became an Internet celebrity favored by brands, and her life and work gradually "integrated".

This kind of story is not exaggerated and is actually very common in China. Moreover, this way of blogging is very much in the style of Xiaohongshu.

Nowadays, it has become a consensus among many personal bloggers to indicate their differentiated identity on the homepage of Xiaohongshu. Many of them are not even full-time bloggers signed by MCN, but they can gain a large number of followers simply by sharing their thoughts on life or work. The content they share may not be vertical enough, but the entire content revolves around "personal thoughts."

The idea of ​​selling products based on this kind of personal narrative is called lifestyle e-commerce by Xiaohongshu.

On July 22, Xiaohongshu released a video of a conversation between COO Conan and economist Xue Zhaofeng. Conan defined Xiaohongshu's e-commerce as "lifestyle e-commerce" for the first time. While all major platforms are trying to give their e-commerce models a resounding name, Xiaohongshu, which has a relatively slow commercialization process, has finally come up with a name for its own e-commerce. It is not so resounding and a bit abstract. In particular, the broad concept of "people" was mentioned many times in the conversation, and some limiting words and specific scenarios were added to interpret it, but it did not explain what the difference is between people on Xiaohongshu and people on other platforms, so that some interpretations on the market today still make people feel confused.

As a heavy user of Xiaohongshu and a personal IP blogger who has created an "Emily-style" account on Xiaohongshu, the author of "New Standpoint" believes that no matter what the name is, Xiaohongshu e-commerce is nothing more than a verticalization of content to identity compared to other content e-commerce platforms. The difference between "Xiaohongshu people" and other "people" lies in the service relationship between content and people.

The underlying logic of this differentiation comes from Xiaohongshu’s own content genes - double waterfall flow, mainly pictures and texts.

1. From people serving content to content serving people

The earliest history of influencers bringing goods can be traced back to the beginning of human civilization. For consumers, this is essentially a way of thinking that "I understand you and approve of your decision-making method, so I follow you to buy things I don't understand." The wine mentioned in the poems of Li Bai and Su Shi would also be sought after by people at that time. However, if we only look at the recent Internet UGC era, the main platforms where influencers are active are text and pictures, videos, and pictures and texts.

The popularity of these three forms in different eras is naturally related to the relevant social media products. At the same time, the changes in these three forms are constantly changing the way people describe the world and convey information, and also determine the identity of bloggers facing the audience.

The era of text and pictures was led by Tieba, Zhihu and early Weibo. Due to the "internet speed" problem in the early stages of Internet development, the text part dominated. At that time, even if there were bloggers who could sell goods, the identity of the bloggers themselves was mostly their real identity in the real world.

The video era of social media emerged almost at the same time as the content recommendation algorithm. Video production is more difficult, and the recommendation algorithm inevitably brings centralization. As long as you master the algorithm rules and purposefully produce vertical content, you can achieve traffic monetization. This will lead to more monetization opportunities tending to be left to full-time bloggers or specialized organizations. At this time, most bloggers are "experts" themselves. It is only at this stage that "experts" become a profession.

The era of pictures and texts can be seen as an evolved version of the era of pictures and texts. The identity of bloggers has returned to their real identities. Taking the blogger type of Xiaohongshu as an example, this real identity is more lifelike.

Xiaohongshu will naturally have full-time influencers, but there will also be former bloggers, curatorial bloggers, decoration bloggers, and interview and evaluation bloggers. Their profiles may say that they are from Shanghai, XX is in France, they may also say that they are looking for a job in XX, and they are living in retirement in XX... These identity labels are just anchor points to reach users. Bloggers will use the identity label anchor points as the center to spread more life stories behind them to users.

Although other video platforms will also have related types of bloggers, the key difference is that on platforms that focus on short videos, the blogger's identity serves the content, while on platforms that focus on pictures and texts, the content serves the blogger's identity.

For video-focused platforms, the core service they provide to users is an immersive viewing experience. In this case, the content itself is more important than the blogger. As long as an account can create a hit video content and convey to the users it reaches that "I can produce more content like this", users will follow the relevant blogger. This is identity serving content.

Such content is often the greatest common denominator of the thoughts of a large group. Unless users consciously ignore what the public is paying attention to, in most cases, the distribution of traffic tends to be given to those who grasp the common denominator of public thought.

The core service provided by the graphic and text platform to users is "strategy". This also echoes the content form of shopping guides when Xiaohongshu was founded. With the development of the platform, what users want to find on Xiaohongshu is no longer limited to single-point product guides, but also includes many other aspects, which we can collectively call "life guides". This is what Xiaohongshu now calls lifestyle.

In a content situation where pictures and texts are the main content, supplemented by videos and live broadcasts, the basic content unit is a simple picture or a paragraph of text, which gives unique personal thoughts more desire to express. In addition, Xiaohongshu's double waterfall browsing form allows users to focus on more content at once, which also gives personal thoughts more opportunities to be heard, no matter how niche such thoughts are.

Take "Guan Yadi", one of the most popular memes on Xiaohongshu recently, for example. It started when a Xiaohongshu user named Guan Yadi casually posted a "nagging" saying that he would avoid interacting with users named momo and would also block momo. This attracted the attention of the momo army on Xiaohongshu, and a group of momos changed their names to Guan Yadi, staging a Xiaohongshu-style "farce". Later, Guan Yadi also responded to the attitude towards this "farce".

But if we follow her homepage, we can easily find that Guan Yadi's business mainly involves movies, podcasts, etc., which have little to do with the series of content triggered by this "farce", but these contents can still be converted into personal attention. This is the content serving her own identity.

In this process, the blogger's personal thoughts and related content are also filtering users, rather than serving users. The change in the relationship between people and content will change the definition of people on the platform.

2. Business bloggers blur the boundaries between groups

This change in the service relationship between people and content also deconstructs the previous inherent relationship between goods and people in content e-commerce.

Generally speaking, there are two ways for businesses to promote their products on content platforms. The first is to cooperate with bloggers, who promote the products by posting pictures, texts, videos, or live broadcasts. The second is for businesses to advertise themselves by posting pictures, texts, videos, or live broadcasts.

The traffic on video platforms is more centralized, so the consumers that businesses find through these bloggers will be more "mass". And due to the unique personal life expressions brought by graphic and text platforms, the consumers that businesses find through these bloggers will be more "niche".

In the previous article of "New Standpoint" "From Price War to Content War, Douyin and Taobao will reach the same destination in 2024", it was mentioned that the new trend in commodity transactions in the future is that the granularity of consumer demand will become higher and higher.

In other words, the major consumption trends will also determine that more opportunities in the future will be hidden in the products that meet precise needs, and human users will become the leaders of these needs.

On Xiaohongshu, it is very common for both merchants and users to carefully reply to every comment under their own content. At the same time, according to the live broadcast data of Xiaohongshu given by a blogger: "Even if there are only thirty people online, the results of a single game can reach five digits." There may be some exaggeration, but this situation is indeed easier to achieve on Xiaohongshu.

In this case, a product may not necessarily attract the same group of people, but may also attract the same magnetic field among multiple different groups of people.

On the other hand, another major feature of Xiaohongshu's commercial model is that the proportion of self-promotion notes by merchants is not small, especially the notes with the word "sponsored". It seems that merchants bypass bloggers to directly promote products, but in fact, they still cannot do without the magnetic field defined by the deep links between users themselves.

Taking the account operated by the author as an example, when the author launched a new keyword in a certain interest circle on Xiaohongshu, this keyword began to be emphasized in multiple deeply linked user circles. Multiple users who followed this keyword did report that they had seen products related to the extended meaning of the keyword.

The high desire to share and deep links between users will bring precise traffic, which will make every click and every pair of "eyes" more meaningful. This is why Xiaohongshu bloggers can realize considerable traffic monetization with only a few thousand or tens of thousands of fans. At the same time, according to the merchants who advertise on Xiaohongshu, they revealed to "New Standpoint" that in their industry (decoration design), the average click-through rate of Xiaohongshu is the highest among all content platforms, "but the conversion rate is indeed the highest.

"After all, it is always people who understand people better, not algorithms themselves, and people's decisions are naturally more valuable than algorithmic decisions. The difference before and after the deconstruction is that before, there might be only one universal template shopping decision for a thousand users, but now there are a thousand different living people to help them make decisions for a thousand users.

This is what Xiaohongshu COO Conan said this time: "Not just consumers and users, but people who can truly create, match and select products based on user needs.

They are Xiaohongshu buyers and Xiaohongshu managers. "In this case, the boundaries between merchants, bloggers and ordinary users have become more blurred on Xiaohongshu.

For example, Conan mentioned this time: "We saw a group of small teams, such as 5-10 people, who initially operated a business based on a very niche demand.

We hope that Xiaohongshu can better support and serve these merchants who serve personalized needs and understand lifestyles.

"As long as users find supply chain solutions and have a certain insight into the relevant magnetic field, they can quickly become merchants.

A more obvious example is the identity of "baby mom" which is popular among many ACG or star-chasing groups. On the surface, "baby mom" is an active user in a certain circle, but because she can do some handicrafts and customize dolls for related characters, she can sell the fruits of her labor to other users in the circle.

Similar cases include cosplay commissioned teachers, painters, and consultants in various circles. Of course, since everyone is in the same circle, any "failure" will quickly spread within the circle. When users sell goods to each other, no matter what position the user gives himself, the core demand is to maintain the magnetic field related to the product.

3. Final Thoughts

Taking the logic of my account as an example, after using Xiaohongshu in an "unknown" way for many years, I finally identified a user mindset that I could reach and impress among the people in a related emerging niche interest circle, and generated a new magnetic field with many users with this mindset.

Therefore, when doing business on Xiaohongshu, finding the magnetic field is a more accurate description than finding a business model, finding products, or even finding a crowd. However, maintaining this magnetic field is not an easy task.

On Xiaohongshu, the attention brought by just a few users' "eyes" is enough to generate a small magnetic field, and the dissatisfaction of just a few users is enough to destroy a magnetic field. This two-sided nature of "the voices of a few people can also be seen" is not only reflected in the content of the notes, but also in the content review mechanism. According to some relevant users, "It is very common for notes to be reported and removed from the shelves, even if there is nothing wrong with the content itself.

"According to a blogger, since late July, the content produced by her interest group has been reported and removed from the shelves in large quantities. "The number is as high as 3,000+, including many popular videos or pictures with more than 10,000 likes. We have contacted the relevant personnel of Xiaohongshu and said that they will deal with this matter." "In Xiaohongshu, every butterfly flaps its wings every time and has a meaning, and we need to adapt to it." The blogger said. *The title picture and the pictures in the text are from the Internet.