Works of the research group of new eyes large companies
The author | Ruan Xue
Edited | Sang Mingqiang
Little Red Book is becoming more and more like a circle of friends among strangers.
At a time when the community attributes are becoming more and more intense, both its designers and users are invisibly promoting Xiaohongshu to build a "city" with physical attributes, users put their daily PO on Xiaohongshu, and the interaction and exchange in the community is regarded as a greeting visit between neighbors.
On the surface, sharing beautiful things, behind it are all kinds of grass and Amway, but this also makes Xiaohongshu deeply immersed in the offline life scene and forms a strong binding. When this virtual community relationship is further strengthened, the projection left by the platform to heavy users is what to do and what to buy, "not to read the relevant content of the Little Red Book will feel unsteady."
But when these cognitions about the community are removed, we can easily find that the interaction similar to the Little Red Book has long existed in our WeChat circle of friends, and unlike the sunshine culture produced by the circle of friends based on social purposes, the Little Red Book has been overshadowed with a layer of guiding commercial color since the moment of its birth.
Like the little sweet potatoes, there is also capital.
In August last year, the Monthly Life of the Little Red Book exceeded 160 million, and a news with a valuation of up to $20 billion caused a heated discussion, and the discussion about the Little Red Book emerged in an endless stream, but it was invariably pointed to: Why is the Little Red Book worth 20 billion? Taking the Q&A community platform Zhihu as an example, the pre-listing valuation was nearly $5 billion, but the listing was broken (the current market value is about $2 billion). Like the community big brother Station B, Little Red Book has also been questioned by its commercialization ability.
In the critical phase of the rapid expansion of the organization: the Little Red Book is like a circle with its own field, but it cannot find the person holding the compass.
Where is the center of the circle?
"Search-based blanks."
The opportunity for Xiaohongshu to be created was simple, and the founder Mao Wenchao failed to find relevant strategies on overseas travel and shopping in search engines, which made him realize that this field was blank in the market. In 2013, when outbound tourism and overseas purchasing grew barbarically, the initial circle of Xiaohongshu was dropped on the reference book, and it also had a more literary slogan: "Put travel into your shopping bag", making up for the information gap and becoming the main anchor point of Xiaohongshu's original users.
This determines that the early Xiaohongshu can only provide users with a product use experience, but as an intermediate link to drive consumer decision-making, Xiaohongshu inadvertently plays the role of a civilian shopping guide, and then derives e-commerce to become a matter of pushing the boat. Later, Xiaohongshu slowly evolved into providing "good things from all over the world", and once regarded other haitao e-commerce companies as their own competitors in order to gain greater valuation space.
At the beginning of 2015, Xiaohongshu Zhengzhou self-operated bonded warehouse was officially put into operation; subsequently, the addition of Shenzhen self-operated bonded warehouse enabled Xiaohongshu to combine self-operation and platform, and completed the transformation from cross-border e-commerce to comprehensive e-commerce. At that time, Xiaohongshu clearly understood that the biggest difference from them was the inversion of the shopping mechanism: when the major global shopping websites relied on people to find goods and used evaluation as a reference when comparing stores, Xiaohongshu formed a field of goods to find people based on the positioning of sharing tools.
The real UGC content is still the main front of the operation, the deduction mechanism to avoid false evaluation is established at this time, and the dry goods note is the object of the platform.
Consumers are attracted by the content they share, generate the desire to buy, then plant grass, and finally complete the cycle of sharing after pulling grass for goods, which is the fundamental logic of Xiaohongshu content e-commerce. Under such a vision, the center of the circle of Xiaohongshu has also begun to gradually shift, although another founder Qu Fang claimed that "Xiaohongshu is not e-commerce, but a playground for everyone to visit and play", but the bonded warehouse area, which ranks second in the national cross-border e-commerce, still firmly adheres to the label of e-commerce on Xiaohongshu.
The real change, occurred in the second half of 2017, cross-border e-commerce into the Red Sea period, the market share of only 4% of the Small Red Book failed to effectively complete the past "the content is beautiful as a flower, e-commerce to make money to support the family" concept, and the larger e-commerce platform, concentrated in beauty, clothing and other vertical small red book advantages are not obvious, "planting grass on the little red book, buy tmall mall" became the consensus of the Haitao family at that time.
The folding of offline stores has also made Xiaohongshu begin to rethink its positioning.
A female star is sharing her ordinary daily life in the Little Red Book, flipping through her Little Red Book notes, but it is to share a piece of dressing experience, share her own hair color failure of the plain face photo, recommend the love of the meat pine online store, live broadcast the process of drawing eyebrows, and even write a note to record the experience of soaking feet, but Lin Yun's accidental pen has become a new starting point for the Little Red Book, and a new circle center has begun to appear.
Similar to Weibo in the direction of popularization, relying on the traffic dividend led by celebrities, Xiaohongshu has injected another wave of fresh blood, and once again aroused people's attention to the content in the Xiaohongshu platform. Lin Yun and other celebrities stationed in Xiaohongshu to share private life experiences is tantamount to staging a small reality show in Xiaohongshu, satisfying the voyeuristic desires of fans, and also driving the content of Xiaohongshu: from focusing on commodity display to focusing more on sharing life. Taking this as an opportunity, the construction of content communities began to be carried out intensively.
Figure: The development process of Xiaohongshu (Source: Xiaohongshu, GF Securities Development Research Center)
The world inside the circle
"There are as many strips as the diameter of a circle, and there are as many ways of life as there are." This sentence is just right to put on the current Little Red Book.
Regarding the use of Xiaohongshu, a thousand users may have a thousand answers, but if the difference in user use is transformed into the product positioning of Xiaohongshu, it becomes a community platform of "thousands of faces", and life is only transformed into a labeled impression and becomes the focus of the outside world to look at Xiaohongshu. However, if you walk into the circle and are not just as simple as sharing life, the field composition of the Little Red Book is more complicated.
In general, similar content community users can be divided into two different types, namely "producers" of community content and "consumers" of community content. Their roles in the community are also very different, the "producer" is responsible for providing content for the "consumer", the "consumer" is responsible for providing feedback to the "producer", taking the B station as an example, there is a clear boundary between the UP owner and the fan.
But Xiaohongshu is different, the relatively low threshold of note content creation and platform unified production templates make most users of Xiaohongshu often have a dual identity, she may follow the big V in the beauty area to learn makeup skills, turn around and write a learning experience to share feelings and makeup whites to discuss together.
Users come to the community to seek common ground, or to meet the psychological needs of their own "sense of belonging", and the distribution mechanism of Little Red Book has also been established: intelligent distribution of user tags and content tags, and heavy content and light fans. In the Little Red Book, as long as the originality of the notes and the interaction rate are high enough, there is a chance to get more recommendation traffic and exposure, which is more friendly to creators, especially creators.
This also makes it a stage for major new consumer brands to perform marketing technology, including excellent "dancers" such as Perfect Diary, Hua Xizi, and Zhong Xue Cake.
A large number of KOCs and ordinary bloggers participate, many commodities, skills in a life-like way, which makes Xiaohongshu gradually become a consumer decision-making platform trusted by users, for the main advertiser, relying on xiaohongshu's note content, even long-tail accounts can produce high exposure and grass planting effects, improving the brand delivery return rate, so in the marketing field there is a brand formula: 20,000 small red books + 1,000 B station + 800 zhihu = a successful new consumer brand.
For Little Red Book, this evolution has both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, the content is moving towards generalization, and on the other hand, the content is deviating from the trend towards falsehood. Xiaohongshu's explosive notes can not escape the two major logics of platform recognition and user recognition, becoming the criterion for the assembly line to create explosive models, the community advocates exquisite and beautiful value orientation, this orientation has become a filtered promoter in front of customized daisen notes, for the first generation of users who have witnessed early content, Xiaohongshu is becoming more and more like a utopian world.
Boundaries that are not visible
Little Red Book is happy to advertise itself as a city without borders.
In the answer sheet submitted to capital, selling word of mouth, selling knowledge, selling communication, and selling value have become the main business of Xiaohongshu, but in essence, it is still doing the business of selling traffic.
For Xiaohongshu, a new round of commercial exploration is reflected in the gradual deepening of the note promotion industry chain. In the past, brands cooperated with MCN Company/KOL in the form of private communication, not through the Little Red Book platform. At the beginning of 2019, Xiaohongshu officially launched the brand partner system, and bloggers with more than 1,000 fans can apply to become brand partners, choose to declare business notes or share notes, and charge a 10% service fee in terms of function similar to the fireworks platform of Station B. After that, through the launch of a series of platforms and functions around the brand transaction, the relevant system of the Little Red Shop has also been upgraded, and in the Little Red Book, we obviously feel that the penetration rate of note filing is accelerating, and participate in the content transaction link between the brand and the blogger, at the same time, the store number integration is gradually being established.
Originality and restraint are seen as the secret of maintaining the ecology of the community, but they also represent the general contradictions in the content community. Although the content is not limited, in fact, there are walls from the moment the community is built, and the imbalance between male and female users in the Little Red Book is enough to illustrate this problem.
But the key is that the development of the community is inseparable from the influx of people, breaking the circle has become an eternal proposition, once the circle cracks, someone comes in means that someone leaves, how to solve the problem of population retention often becomes another big problem, struggling in such a contradiction, some of the behaviors of The Little Red Book are always contradictory, just like Qu Fang said, "Entrepreneurs should not be afraid to hit their own faces." ”
Xiaohongshu is always on the road of continuous revision, on the one hand betting on advertising cooperation between bloggers and brands, on the other hand, for the sake of user experience control, such as after the launch of new features in August last year, the function of commodity links in notes was stuck, personal bloggers can no longer hang external links, and the platform has also strengthened the soft and wide crackdown, trying to maintain the community ecology through the clear division of commercial content and ordinary content.
But dramatically, users don't use the content as Envisaged by Little Red Book. For most users, Xiaohongshu is actually being used as a search engine and is developing towards a new generation of Baidu. According to the micro-broadcast easy data research, 90% of the Xiaohongshu users have searched for the Xiaohongshu before purchasing, 60% of the traffic of the Xiaohongshu comes from the search page, "search" is actually one of the most important home page behaviors of the Xiaohongshu users, and the search-first users account for 38% of the xiaohongshu home page traffic.
The content of the Little Red Book makes it like a circle with a magnetic field, always in the change of the magnetic field, and there may not be a definite answer to where the boundary of the circle is until it is truly finalized. But how big this circle can be drawn, it has always been driven by invisible forces, such a force exists universally among all community platforms, which makes them unable to avoid the fate of the larger the traffic and the worse the reputation from the beginning of their birth.