The author | Bai Qian
Edit | Tsukimi
There is more and more news about the Little Red Book.
Not long ago, Xiaohongshu disclosed a set of data - as of November 2021, Xiaohongshu MAU exceeded 200 million.
There is still a big gap between this data and Jitter. However, under the pressure of the Matthew effect of Douyin and Kuaishou, in 2021, Xiaohongshu and Station B will become one of the few content communities where users are still growing rapidly.
Another layer of concern is that there is more and more news that many Internet companies are trying to create a content community similar to xiaohongshu.
This momentum begins to spread from 2020. Taobao used "shopping" to replace the first-level entrance of "Weitao"; Douyin placed the "Planting Grass" section under the interface of the same city; Ctrip placed the community into the first-level entrance; and Dianping filled the home page information flow with user content. In e-commerce and instrumental mobile products, the importance of content is constantly emphasized.
Among them, trading platforms, content platforms and tool platforms have all become participants in this momentum. The logic behind it is worth investigating, at the time when the mobile Internet traffic dividend peaked, what is the reason why the content community and Xiaohongshu have received attention?
01 What is the value of the community?
In the comment area of Xiaohongshu Raider Notes, Yaoyao is keen to share the content of the preparation strategy of the teacher qualification certificate and share her preparation experience with users. The content of her Little Red Book personal homepage consists of three parts - preparation tips, inspirational quotes and life sharing, and some users leave messages in the comment area:
"Thank you sisters for sharing and working together."
This can be seen as a microcosm of the value of the Little Red Book content community. Below the guide notes she posted, many people asked about the purchase of relevant online courses and reference books, and people with similar needs spontaneously gathered in the comment area to discuss their preparation experience.
For users, Xiaohongshu has the communication function of the circle of friends, but does not rely on WeChat's acquaintance social system, but focuses on strange users with the same interests. This may also be the reason why big manufacturers pay attention to Xiaohongshu - through similar community construction, enhance the user activity and stickiness of the entire platform.
To be precise, rather than saying that the big manufacturers want to recreate a "little red book", it is better to say that the user value of the content community in the form of double-column waterfall products is being re-recognized.
For the trading platform, Xiaohongshu actually provides different user scenarios. In a complete consumption chain, users often generate initial consumption demand through scenarios such as recommendation by friends around them, network content browsing, etc., and then confirm the demand through more network content browsing, and finally cash in on the trading platform by searching for orders.
In this process, the trading platform undertakes the cashing of user needs, and less involves the generation and confirmation of demand. The reason is that the scenes provided by the two sides are different.
In major shopping festivals such as Double 11 and June 18, fatigue and nervousness are becoming the voice of more users, which is in stark contrast to the image of users who brush up on community recommended streaming content and are willing to actively collect and comment. If you can't cut into the community scene and provide users with a pleasant and comfortable content consumption experience, the consumption dividend brought by the content will be difficult to cash in.
The rise of content e-commerce such as Douyin and Kuaishou in the past few years has made people realize how huge the traffic that content brings to e-commerce.
Alibaba has long seen these possibilities, and at the annual seller conference in March 2016, Daniel Zhang, then CEO of Alibaba Group, said at the meeting that the development of community, content and local life will be the three major directions of Taobao in the future.
5 years later, Taobao changed its slogan to "too good to shop", which means that communityization and contentization have progressed to a new stage. But at this time, Douyin e-commerce has risen from the ground.
Obtaining a user group with higher commercial value is also one of the reasons why large manufacturers create their own "Little Red Book".
Among Xiaohongshu's 200 million monthly active users, the proportion of post-90s users reached 72%, and the proportion of users in first- and second-tier cities reached 50%. This means that the user group is more curious and has a stronger fashion concept. A phenomenon worthy of attention is that young people pay attention to weight loss, fitness and other topics in the B station and Xiaohongshu to break the circle faster, actor Yin is in Xiaohongshu after the release of fat reduction stew recipes, related content quickly became popular in the community, and triggered a wave of user imitation.
For the community, grasping this part of the core users and placing them in the form of a community is conducive to increasing the activity of the entire user group. In the glider theory of social networks, the initial core users determine whether the community is alive or not. A group of core user groups with stronger willingness to interact, desire to explore, and spending power will find a longer-term development space for the community.
02 1.23% difference in the community
A phenomenon worth paying attention to is that as of today, Taobao shopping, Jingdong shopping section, Douyin planting grass, public reviews guess you like, etc. all use the form of double waterfall flow on the interface, which is similar to Xiaohongshu; and users can consult similar product planting content on any platform, and the creator's cross-douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, B station and other platforms have released and synchronized content has become the norm.
However, at multiple levels such as users and content, the differences between platforms are still obvious.
On the basis of the general entertainment and short video in the domestic community, users still retain their inherent way of thinking, such as participating in public event discussions on Weibo, browsing secondary content on station B, brushing entertainment information on Douyin, finding life experience in Xiaohongshu, and so on.
After a recent study of the popular content and topics of various content platforms in 2021, the new list found that the content on the Little Red Book clearly showed the characteristics of life.
Internet watcher Jin Yechen said in a live broadcast that most of the content in several content communities may be the same, the difference is that those categories that are only or strong in a certain community are only. He cites the genetic differences between humans and orangutans as an example, and in the genome map of the two sides, 98.77% of the base sequences are the same, and the difference is only 1.23%.
In other words, this 1.23% genetic difference determines that humans and orangutans are two completely different species. Similar to the 1.23% of the few genes that determine human evolution, the minority content also determines the differential positioning of the community on the mobile Internet.
Obviously, genes and minds exist in different communities, which in turn leads to differences in the minds of users on different platforms. Xiaohongshu was born as an overseas shopping guide, the early content was mainly to share overseas shopping strategies, and its early core user group was also dominated by urban groups with cross-border consumption needs, they provided early content for the community, and further influenced more groups through the advantages of consumption experience.
To this day, Little Red Book still maintains a similar spread pattern - the core consumers/experiencers in a certain field take the lead in sharing their experiences and attracting more users to join them.
The grass planting function of Xiaohongshu is more of a derivative of the higher reference value of the lifestyle of the core user group - whether it is an early product form based on cross-border shopping guides or a core user group, it provides a life experience template with more attractive content and higher reference value.
In this context, users trust and interact with the community's life experience content, closer to spontaneous behavior than to the result specified by the platform.
A pregnant Woman Xiaohongshu user once shared his experience: "Before pregnancy, I didn't like Xiaohongshu, but after pregnancy, I watched my posture gradually become blessed, and I couldn't help but open Xiaohongshu, and you found that there were mothers with the same body shape as you, mothers who strictly controlled diets, and mothers who stole ice cream." This gives me comfort, I am not the only one out of shape, but also give me fighting spirit. The Little Red Book community has a kind of magic, no matter what kind of attitude you have, people give you more encouragement and recognition. So I also tried to share my pregnancy and childbirth experience with The Little Red Book, and the praise has now exceeded 10,000. ”
And this inclusive community atmosphere is related to the community gene. From the founding stage, on the basis of sharing personal lifestyles, Xiaohongshu did not develop a core user circle with exclusivity, and was more receptive to new areas and perspectives.
How to form and maintain a community sharing atmosphere is a difficult problem for products that want to be contented and community-oriented.
03 The content of the Little Red Book is compounded
As more and more products embark on the process of "Little Red Book", the pressure comes to the side of Little Red Book - to maintain their differences under the pressure of competition and growth.
Since 2019, the wave of video driven by Douyin has swept the entire network community. The TikTok wind spread to almost all content communities. The video of The Little Red Book was also once filled with vibrato-style entertainment content. The competition between Kuaishou and Douyin makes people realize that the more they are like Douyin, the faster they will disappear.
Su Qingyang, head of the NetEase Cloud Music Community and community product manager, believes that in this case, an important change made by Xiaohongshu is to finally determine the value orientation of the content ecology, and the video must be useful. Under the guidance of this value orientation, now turn to the video of the Little Red Book, "you will find that each video is useful information, so that the content attributes and tool attributes of the Little Red Book are relatively strong." ”
Another difference of Little Red Book is the attitude of the super head. Compared with Luo Xiang of Station B, who said criminal law, Zhang Xue of Douyin and other super head authors, the little red book in the video era still does not have a super head of the circle-breaking level. The disadvantage is that the individual content of Xiaohongshu is rarely concentrated on breaking the circle to the external platform, and the image of the creator is blurred; the advantage is that the long-tail content has received more attention in Xiaohongshu, and more than one user said that the newcomer content also has a lot of attention in Xiaohongshu.
To some extent, this can be regarded as the positioning of the value of the community by Little Red Book under the wave of pan-entertainment content.
Abandoning the way of super head authors and content promotes the cultivation of a pluralistic community atmosphere to motivate more users to spontaneously participate in the consumption and construction of community content. This is crucial to the user value formed by Little Red Book.
In the case of the pregnant mother mentioned above, a woman who lacks interest in consumer content can still find the user experience of maintaining her figure during pregnancy in the Xiaohong Book and spontaneously transform into a creator. Without community attention to the long-tail ecology, a similar creator experience cannot be established in Little Red Book.
For Xiaohongshu, this is conducive to accumulating compound interest of user value.
Among the mainstream content forms of content platforms such as public hotspots, entertainment content and life experience, the consumables attribute of life experience is undoubtedly the lowest. Compared with public hotspots and entertainment content, life experience content tends to receive continuous attention from users over a longer period of time.
Taking the epidemic prevention content as an example, the Users of the Little Red Book in 2022 are still reading, learning from the experience of home isolation and material storage in 2020, and sharing more personal experiences on the platform.
This means that as long as the relevant needs exist, the useful life experience content of Xiaohongshu has value and can create a compound interest accumulation effect that continues to attract the attention of users.
The compound interest that continues to accumulate and amplify these contents may be the "moat" of The Little Red Book.