Xiaohongshu is a lifestyle platform for young people, founded by Mao Wenchao and Qu Fang in Shanghai in 2013. Xiaohongshu’s mission is “Inspire Lives to share and discover the world’s wonderful”, users can record life through short videos, graphics and other forms, share lifestyles, and form interactions based on interests. As of October 2019, Xiaohongshu’s monthly active users have exceeded 100 million, of which 70% of users are post-90s, and continue to grow rapidly.
Xiaohongshu Community
Unlike other e-commerce platforms, Xiaohongshu started from the community. At the beginning, users focused on sharing overseas shopping experience in the community. Later, in addition to beauty and personal care, information sharing on sports, travel, home, travel, hotels, and restaurants appeared on Xiaohongshu, which touched on consumer experience And all aspects of lifestyle. Today, the community has become a barrier for Xiaohongshu, and is also a place that other platforms cannot replicate.
At the beginning of 2016, Xiaohongshu changed the manual operation content to the form of machine distribution. Through large data and artificial intelligence, the content in the community is accurately matched to users who are interested in it, thereby improving the user experience.
As a lifestyle community, the biggest uniqueness of Xiaohongshu is that most Internet communities rely more on online virtual identities, and the content published by Xiaohongshu users comes from real life. A sharing user must have Only with rich life and consumption experience can content be shared in Xiaohongshu, and then attract fans’ attention.
Most online communities are virtual communities, where users consume content online and the experience ends online. Xiaohongshu is called ‘three-dimensional community’. This is because the user has to go back to real life to consume in order to complete this experience.
In Xiaohongshu, a user’s “online sharing” consumption experience triggers “community interaction”, which can promote other users to “offline consumption”. These users will in turn conduct more “online sharing”. Eventually form a positive loop. As people’s lives become more and more digitized, the Xiaohongshu community has played a greater role in the “consumption upgrade” tide.
In the past few years, new brands including Perfect Diary, Zhong Xuegao, Xiaoxian Stew, Gu Yu, Maia Active, etc. have grown up on Xiaohongshu. Old brands such as Warrior, Baique, Dabaitu, Li Ning, etc. More young people love it and become the representative of new consumer brands. Xiaohongshu has also become an important frontier for helping new consumers and empowering new brands.
Xiaohongshu e-commerce
Xiaohongshu Welfare Co., Ltd. went online in October 2014 to solve another problem of overseas shopping: not available. The accumulated overseas shopping information of Xiaohongshu analyzes the most popular products and global shopping trends, and on this basis, provides the best things in the world to users in the shortest path and in the most concise way.
The uniqueness of Xiaohongshu e-commerce lies in:
First, word-of-mouth marketing. There is no way to increase the conversion rate more than the word-of-mouth of real users, just as users will definitely read user reviews before buying on Taobao. Xiaohongshu has a community where real users share word-of-mouth, and the entire community is a huge user word-of-mouth library. Second, the selection under structured data. The community of Xiaohongshu has accumulated a lot of consumer word-of-mouth, just like tens of millions of users have discovered and shared good things around the world on this platform. In addition, users’ browsing, likes and collections will generate a lot of Underlying information. Through these materials, Xiaohongshu can accurately analyze the needs of users and ensure that the purchased goods are highly respected by users.
In the five months since Xiaohongshu launched the e-commerce model, its sales have reached more than 200 million RMB; as of May 2017, Xiaohongshu had nearly 10 billion in revenue.
On June 6, 2017, on the anniversary of Xiaohongshu, the sales reached 100 million yuan 2 hours after the sale; on the same day, Xiaohongshu ranked first in the Apple APPStore shopping download; in 2016, Xiaohongshu participated in the “66” big The number of products promoted was 10,000, which increased to 150,000 in 2017.
In Xiaohongshu, tens of millions of real consumer experiences from users have merged into the world’s largest consumer word-of-mouth database, which has also made Xiaohongshu a “think tank” valued by brands. Stephan Wilmet, L’Oréal’s Chief User Officer, said: “In Xiaohongshu, we can directly listen to the true voice of consumers. Real word of mouth is the strongest link between brands and consumers.”
Xiaohongshu has become a link between Chinese consumers and excellent brands. Through Xiaohongshu, Chinese consumers learned about good brands abroad. For example, Tatcha has a good reputation in the United States, but it is unknown in China. After users share the consumer experience in the community, it gradually attracts the attention and favor of Chinese consumers. Now, Xiaohongshu becomes the only partner of Tatcha in China.
Xiaohongshu is also committed to promoting Chinese brands to the world. A number of outstanding domestic brands have already been gathered on Xiaohongshu. With the help of the Xiaohongshu community’s word-of-mouth model, these brands do not have to invest a lot of resources in advertising marketing, but can focus on design and quality. Qu Fang, founder of Xiaohongshu, said: “We believe that as long as the best design, optimal quality and consumers are connected, a Chinese brand with market potential will rise.”
