The author | Sakuragi
Edit | Tsukimi
Just as there is no holiday lawn and a tent to escape camping, consumers who can't travel far have recently rushed to the local internet celebrity shops in The Little Red Book.
For three consecutive days, "New Entropy" found through on-site visits to a number of Xiaohongshu Net Red shops that short-term over-traffic overload is making merchants burn out, and the brand trust that was originally established is also being overdrawn and consumed.
In addition to the headaches of merchants, Wang Bin, as a small red book medium active in Zhengzhou, indicated to "New Entropy" that the business was about to roll up.
"This year, I want to switch from Internet celebrity promotion to Little Red Book Information Flow, and I talked to a few friends, and there is more space there."
Wang Bin said that even if he worked as hard as last year, he was busy until one or two o'clock in the night every day, and he could not reach last year's income. After experiencing the rapid development of Xiaohongshu in 2021, more and more entrants have entered the market, from the former self-media people to mcN with live broadcasts, all of which want to take advantage of the market to enter this market and share a piece of the pie.
However, the contradiction between merchants and influencers also arises.
"Many stores, just talked about promotion cooperation, small Internet celebrities flocked to, business reception capacity is limited, group photo punch card, in the little red book lively, in fact, the business is helping." Lao Wang continued.
During the Qingming Holiday, "New Entropy" visited a number of Internet celebrity shops recommended by Little Red Book. Due to the inconvenience of travel caused by the epidemic, punching in local shops has become a popular consumption method for young people during holidays, and many of them have newly opened stores, forming a phenomenon of queuing to punch in. The influx of traffic has made many Internet celebrity shops experience a rollercoaster encounter, from the fire queue to the questioning and complaining in just three days.
"There is a specific mechanism for the flow tilt of little red book, as long as a blogger traffic runs well, bloggers will start to imitate the trend." It doesn't matter if the thing is good or not, as long as you can get traffic and attention, everyone will flock to it. A senior blogger of little red books said.
In the Little Red Book, businesses, media, and bloggers seem to be caught in the dilemma of losing more.
01 The "three losses" behind the net red shop
"The package price of 100 bloggers on our side is 20,000 yuan, and 50 bloggers are 10,000 yuan, and if there is no profit, it will not be picked up." A medium that runs a Little Red Book blogger quotes prices with ease. It is these media companies that undertake a large number of local life businesses of Little Red Book.
Most of these media companies have transformed from the self-media of the two micro-era. "Human sea tactics" is a chore for the Xiaohongshu official, but it is the most commonly used form of promotion for them: recruiting in multiple WeChat groups, uniformly matching food for merchants, bloggers collectively visiting stores to take photos and punch cards, and then maintaining a month or so of bombing propaganda, simple and rude.
This was not the case when the market for local life in Little Red Book was just developing. Recalling the glorious years of 2021, Wang Bin's smile has a slight hint of arrogance. "When I first found out that Little Red Book could make money, it was really easy to do. It doesn't take much to get a good person, and the effect can be done well. At that time, a set of methodologies was accumulated, selecting more accurate drainage keywords in the notes, arranging a more reasonable delivery rhythm, etc., the business effect was good, and we also had to earn. There are a few buddies who bought a Porsche last year alone. ”
However, the good times are not long, and by the second half of 2021, the pressure on the Xiaohongshu media has obviously increased a lot. The gradual maturity of douyin group buying has squeezed out many shop experts, and the decline of Weibo traffic has gradually made the original lifestyle bloggers gradually shift their positions. The Little Red Book, a zone that is not overly commercialized, has become the focus of everyone's attention.
"The market is so big, there are more people who can play this set of jobs, it will be different immediately, and the most obvious feeling is that they start to use the number of people to grab the work." Our set of precision drainage methods is slowly expelled. Wang Bin continued.
Of course, if you grab the medium of work, life is not good. As merchants and talent connectors, they are also gradually discovering that they can only maintain their original level of profitability with a larger workload and a lower price. In some local life directions, only bloggers with more than 100 packages have room for profit. But the labor costs consumed, as well as the time, also make them tired.
"We are too tired, both to dock the business, but also to organize activities, after the blogger completed the store visit we also have to review the proofreading, and customer feedback effect, to the blogger checkout, the last activity down, before and after several days, in addition to the cost of the final profit of thousands of dollars." A few thousand dollars to organize activities for more than 100 people is not very reasonable. "A local medium pours bitter water on the "new entropy".
On the other hand, for bloggers, the Little Red Book has also begun to lose its appeal. "The money is too small, 100, 200 are more, most of the time it is the merchant who manages the meal or some discount coupons, but to participate in an event and have to dress up, and to take pictures, and everyone has to queue up to take pictures a lot of times, tired to death." 」 Local blogger Kaneko said.
Unable to make money, poor experience, no room for development, bloggers are increasingly feeling that the value of Little Red Book is not high, and they are quitting in batches. "My little red book is almost to save materials for Douyin, sometimes synchronizing the video of Douyin, and that's all." Kaneko went on to explain.
In addition to the media and bloggers, small and medium-sized businesses also have ambivalence about the Little Red Book.
On the one hand, they are pandering to little red book preferences with a mature methodology. "The same style, the same designer, the emphasis on the photographic environment, the clerk dressed stylishly, the product imitates the mature path of the north, Shanghai and Guangzhou." These conditions are almost perfectly adapted to the user base of Little Red Book. A local merchant explained. On the other hand, they are also afraid that the influx of traffic will only make bloggers, "to put it bluntly, after sending photos, most of them will not come again." Short-term prosperity is difficult to maintain. ”
Media, merchants, bloggers, players involved in the chain of interests of Little Red Book's local life seem to be experiencing some degree of physical and mental exhaustion. And this year's Qingming holiday will undoubtedly amplify such contradictions indefinitely.
02 Little Red Book "Stocking" Local Life
Today, when Dachang is desperately trying to increase the local life, Xiaohongshu's attitude has shown an unprecedented "ambiguity", and for the big cake of local life, Xiaohongshu seems to be very open.
In 2021, Xiaohongshu began to launch local life-related functions, including increasing store POI, hotel, homestay booking, etc., but so far Xiaohongshu has only been limited to content sharing in terms of exploring stores. For how to develop local life next, Xiaohongshu has not made a clear statement to the outside world.
According to iResearch data, the size of China's local life service market will be 19.5 trillion yuan in 2020 and is expected to grow to 35.3 trillion yuan by 2025. The penetration rate of the Internet in local life services is only 12.7%, and the growth rate of more than 20% can still be maintained in the next 3 to 4 years.
In the face of such a large incremental market, why is Xiaohongshu not in a hurry to exert its strength?
The reason for this, in the final analysis, is that in the local life discourse system dominated by the US group, the adaptability of the Xiaohongshu business model is very weak. According to the research report of Tianfeng Securities, the core competitiveness of Xiaohongshu lies in its unique community advantages, which have become the basis for planting grass and commercialization: from the perspective of content production, by lowering the production threshold of UGC and guiding creators to adapt to community tone; from the perspective of content distribution, decentralized traffic distribution methods and the mechanism of "heavy content, light talent" encourage middle-waist and tail bloggers to output high-quality content, forming a prosperous KOC ecology.
Group aesthetic preferences will produce better efficacy under the mechanism of the Little Red Book. In other words, in the head anchor of Little Red Book, the power of super bloggers is not as great as that of other platforms. Marketing promotion is more focused on "casting a wide net" of propaganda. One of the most typical is the marketing route of Perfect Diary, Xiaohongshu successfully helps Perfect Diary to enhance the user's purchase conversion through the combination of "human sea tactics" and the combination of head anchor production volume + waist and tail anchor word of mouth transmission.
Such a platform mechanism means that large brands and star products are more likely to form a closed loop of commercial value on the Little Red Book. In the face of a local life market with scattered merchants and low brand power, such a platform mechanism will become at a loss.
KOCs are almost unable to work together in the face of local lifestyle businesses that do not have strong financial support. Due to the difference in user portraits, it is impossible to play a similar way of group purchase low-price drainage. The most important thing is that Little Red Book is unlikely to have the energy to serve such a fine-grained business.
Of course, Xiaohongshu also tries to increase the intensity of individual drainage by launching "Fries" with similar jitter plus functions, but due to deviations from the overall platform attributes, it cannot show good results, and even the results of Fries drainage are not as good as natural traffic.
"Fries 5,000 reads 50 yuan, we only give how much money to an event, not to mention, its traffic is sometimes not as good as organic flow." Local life blogger Kaneko explains.
03 The dilemma of symbolization of influencer shops
According to the view of Kong Rong of Tianfeng Securities: The biggest advantage of Xiaohongshu in the content platform is accuracy. In the early days, it accurately targeted the user base with young women as the main body, and then expanded to a larger user group, and extended the commercial territory on this basis.
However, while accelerating the success of Little Red Book, the public is also gradually symbolizing this platform. Especially for the direction of local life, the "filter door" in 2021 has pulled the authenticity of the Little Red Book under the sun, and has survived a crisis of trust after rectification.
Today, the local life of the little red book that grows savagely seems to be caught in another symbolic situation of its own ecology. Bloggers have marked Xiaohongshu with the symbol of "no money, no growth", and merchants have gradually found that the function of the Xiaohongshu platform is single, that is, the drainage is acceptable and the development is insufficient. At the same time, the medium in the middle seems to be like a person who has fallen from the wind outlet, gradually waking up and leaving in batches.
Returning to the Little Red Book platform itself, under the growth of beauty, maternal and infant advantages, they have not found the chaos of local life, just as they did not find a lifestyle sharing under a perfect filter, which will cause a public relations crisis for themselves.
A professional close to the field of e-commerce once said: The essence of the content community is local culture, and the content overflow of local culture to social culture is the value of the community. When the level of community users approaches the average of social groups, the content surplus of local culture to social culture disappears, and the value of community enters a period of annihilation.
The entry of the Little Red Book into local life is, to some extent, the overflow of local culture to the content of social culture. When the Little Red Book in the rising period produces spillover effects through exquisite content, the size of the community will continue to grow, and the capital market will be willing to pay a premium for this growth. But if, because of barbaric growth, this content culture overflow is symbolized, and the growth stagnation is not difficult to predict.
And the key to all this is how to create a different local life discourse system from Meituan Dianping, in this regard, the successful experience of the picture social software Instagram and Pineest may be worth learning for Xiaohongshu.
The dark war of local life has now entered a more fierce competition, and whether Xiaohongshu can highlight the siege and lead the community to complete the breakthrough seems to be a big challenge.