Xiaohongshu commercialization, bet on live streaming e-commerce?

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The news that Zhiheng, the head of Xiaohongshu's commercialization, will leave in the near future, has flooded the media circle.

In March 2020, Zhiheng joined Xiaohongshu and served as senior vice president and head of commercial advertising on Sina Weibo before joining. According to media reports, "Zhiheng's adjustment may be related to the business growth being less than expected." Xiaohongshu's commercialization strategy this year will have major adjustments. In the past, Xiaohongshu's e-commerce and advertising were more about imitating and learning from previous experience, without their own ideas, let alone combining their own reality. It is reported that in 2022, the scale of Xiaohongshu users will double, but the commercial revenue will only increase by 20%, and the commercialization of Xiaohongshu is also recognized as a weak link in the industry.

In this regard, Zhiheng released a circle of friends suspected of clarifying the matter: "I got the news that I am leaving from a few good friends tonight, thank you for the media attention." She said that Xiaohongshu is her love, and "it takes a lot of effort to really understand and do a good job in the matter of planting grass products." Under the circle of friends, Xiaohongshu founder Qu Fang and other Xiaohongshu executives liked and left messages.

Little Red Book CMO Heng

According to LatePost, Xiaohongshu is adjusting its organizational structure, betting on live streaming e-commerce, upgrading the live streaming business to an independent department, and unified management of live content and live streaming e-commerce.

There are indications that Xiaohongshu is re-examining its commercial layout over and over again.

In the 10 years since its establishment, Xiaohongshu's monthly activity has reached 260 million, the monthly active creators have reached 20 million, the daily release volume of notes has reached 3 million+, and the per capita single-day usage time has increased from 26.49 minutes in 2018 to 55.31 minutes.

However, because Xiaohongshu has been firmly promoting the "decentralized" content distribution model, on the one hand, it provides space for mid-waist bloggers to make frequent explosions, on the other hand, it also leads to Xiaohongshu not being like Douyin has big wolf dog couples, Kuaishou has Simba family, and B station has Luo Xiang, with strong platform attributes and identification of out-of-circle bloggers.

Xiaohongshu content distribution mechanism

Even Dong Jie, who was recently known as "Little Red Book's first sister with goods", has only 1.486 million fans, and according to cicada Xiaohong's statistics, the current number of fans is the highest, in addition to the brand number "Welfare Society" reaching 16.855 million, it is Fan Bingbing, who entered Xiaohongshu earlier with 15.822 million.

In its tenth year, Xiaohongshu is still anxiously waiting for its 20 million followers.

Why is there no "top stream"?

Talking about Xiaohongshu's first top blogger, what cannot be missed is that after Fan Bingbing settled in at the end of 2017, the trend of stars turning into beauty bloggers brought goods in Xiaohongshu.

At the beginning of her settlement, Fan Bingbing was originally to promote her personal skin care brand "FANBEAUTY" as a foreshadowing, but she accidentally became popular as the "queen of goods". The masks, lipsticks, sunglasses and other products she shared with Xiaohongshu all triggered snapping purchases, and in just half a year, Xiaohongshu had more than 10 million fans.

After that, Xiaohongshu began to welcome a large-scale settlement of stars.

In 2018, Xiaohongshu fired the first shot in the public circle by sponsoring two talent shows "Idol Trainee" and "Creation 101". As a sponsor, in addition to implanting regular actions such as logos, oral broadcasts, and patches in variety shows, Xiaohongshu also invites trainees to post news in Xiaohongshu, and at the same time, opens an official voting channel to let fans call their favorite trainees.

According to data from Analysys, with the increasingly fierce talent competition, Xiaohongshu's monthly activity scale has steadily increased from 14.047 million in January 2018 to 25.496 million in May of the same year, successfully using the IP popularity of talent shows to build brand awareness.

Source: Analysys

By the end of last year, there were 100 Xiaohongshu fans of more than one million stars, and the three female stars led by Fan Bingbing, Lin Yun and Zhao Lusi had more than 10 million fans, and ranked in the top five of Xiaohongshu's fan list. For Xiaohongshu, the entry of celebrities has created a new era for the platform, and compared with the popularity of bloggers, the public awareness and traffic exposure of celebrities are far an order of magnitude higher than that of bloggers.

But the celebrity group is mobile, they are not only Xiaohongshu, but also the number of fans of celebrities on other social platforms.

Because of this, users do not have a clear and deep impression of Xiaohongshu's "top bloggers", which is closely related to Xiaohongshu's decentralized traffic mechanism and operation direction.

According to rocket big data collation, in May 2022, the largest number of Xiaohongshu explosive articles was KOC (1,000-50,000 fans), followed by KOLs (more than 50,000 fans), and finally amateurs (less than 1,000 fans). Although the number of amateur bursts and the rate of popping articles are the lowest, amateur users occupy the majority of Xiaohongshu, and the characteristics of the popping content also reflect the preferences of Xiaohongshu's overall users to a certain extent.

Source: Rocket Big Data

According to Next Entertainment Observation, the form of amateur explosive articles is mainly graphic and textual, and the types are mainly star entertainment, film and television information, funny and interesting facts, and product-related, and there is accident. Taking user "Rina" as an example, on March 7, she released a screenshot of other Xiaohongshu users sharing AirPods sound effects product-related notes, with 67,000 likes, but other notes on the homepage shared product trials or daily life, the positioning was not clear, and the number of fans was only 109.

It's not uncommon for amateurs like "Rina" to accidentally post explosive articles, and sometimes even users themselves can't figure out why the note exploded.

If you want to attribute the reason, it may be related to Xiaohongshu's activation mechanism for users.

Simply put, when users have not posted notes for a long time, Xiaohongshu may give exposure rewards to motivate users to send notes.

The instability of this bursting article reflects that Xiaohongshu traffic will not gather in a fixed group of bloggers, further leading to the delay in the emergence of "top bloggers".

"Top stream" and commercialization

The absence of top bloggers not only makes it difficult for Xiaohongshu to have unique explosive models with platform characteristics, but also has an impact on commercialization.

Intuitively, compared with Douyin, Kuaishou, and B station, Xiaohongshu's waist and tail bloggers are more favored by advertisers.

According to the 2021 New Media Content Ecological Data Report, 57.6% of Xiaohongshu's tail accounts were launched throughout the year, more than twice as many as other platforms.

"2021 New Media Content Ecological Data Report"

This decentralized delivery logic gives Xiaohongshu more waist and tail bloggers the opportunity to replace KOC as the brand's preferred choice.

JoJo, the head of a beauty brand, told Next Entertainment Observation that if the budget is limited, the number of KOCs available for release is much higher than KOLs, coupled with Xiaohongshu's "explosive metaphysics", investing in KOLs will not necessarily be explosive, not as cost-effective as KOC volume, and there is also the possibility of pressing explosive articles.

However, on the Douyin platform, this logic has become KOL as the center of gravity and KOC as the auxiliary, mainly because Douyin is the recommended content of the platform, leaving more operational space for brands to invest and create explosive models.

More importantly, Xiaohongshu focuses on grass planting effects and cannot see direct sales conversion, JoJo said that his choice will tend to choose bloggers with strong live streaming capabilities on other platforms.

However, live streaming has always been a difficult point on the road to the commercialization of Xiaohongshu.

At the beginning of this year, some users found that the "shopping" entrance of the bottom navigation bar of Xiaohongshu has been replaced by "video", while the "shopping" that originally enjoyed the primary entrance has been retreated to the secondary entrance and appears in the top secondary navigation bar.

Screenshot of Little Red Book

In January last year, the head of Xiaohongshu e-commerce, Jess, left due to family reasons, and Xiaohongshu also made organizational restructuring, and the original community department and e-commerce department were merged into a new community department.

Until the appearance of Dong Jie's live broadcast room this year, Xiaohongshu had a benchmark case that could be taken out.

At the end of February, Dong Jie conducted a live broadcast with goods in Xiaohongshu, without the noise of "link on 321", without the oppression of urging orders, without the assistant broadcaster on the side to cooperate, only Dong Jie faced the camera alone, quietly introducing the goods, such a quiet painting style is unique in the live broadcast goods industry.

According to the official data of Xiaohongshu, the number of live broadcast views that night exceeded 2.2 million, ranking first in the popularity list for 6 consecutive hours, with a cumulative GMV of more than 30 million yuan, ranking first on the Xiaohongshu belt list.

For Xiaohongshu, 30 million live broadcast GMV is already a very good result, before this, Xiaohongshu's head blogger's single-game transaction volume was around one million.

The high-priced selection of customers in Dong Jie's live broadcast room has also become the keyword of Xiaohongshu's recent promotion.

After Dong Jie completed 2 live broadcasts, Xiaohongshu announced the data of e-commerce live broadcasts, saying that in 2022, the number of Xiaohongshu e-commerce live broadcast anchors increased by 337% year-on-year, and the number of live broadcasts increased by 214% year-on-year, at the same time, Xiaohongshu also announced that it will provide tens of billions of traffic support for fashion category merchants and anchors, as well as support policies such as pallet selection, marketing tools, and platform services.

For a long time, Xiaohongshu has been striving to achieve a closed loop of e-commerce, and Dong Jie's performance is undoubtedly a sample for this, and her goods are mostly 100 yuan, 1000 yuan niche designer style, which is also the advantage category of Xiaohongshu. At present, Dong Jie's Xiaohongshu account has reached 1.486 million fans and is still growing.

Compared with when Douyin found Luo Yonghao as a brother, Xiaohongshu also urgently needs a "first sister" like Dong Jie to stand on the platform to shout, and whether users can survive through live broadcasts, the growth of Dong Jie's fan count determines how long this "first sister" can help Xiaohongshu continue to raise the banner of live broadcasting.

When will it break through "20 million"?

For Xiaohongshu, which has been established for 10 years, for the healthy development of the community ecology, it rarely tries to expand commercialization in a radical way.

According to LatePost, community and e-commerce are Xiaohongshu's two parallel main businesses, but there is also a game between the two businesses.

Community has always been Xiaohongshu's core business, and the platform's traffic distribution largely needs to give priority to the needs of the community, followed by e-commerce business.

Because live streaming has strong sales attributes, which is inconsistent with Xiaohongshu's decentralized tonality, it is difficult to aggregate users in a certain live broadcast room through platform recommendations.

For example, if the user wants to watch the live broadcast of a Xiaohongshu blogger, he needs to click through the blogger's flashing avatar and the following page, that is, the user actively chooses, rather than the platform forcibly pushes.

Because of this, Xiaohongshu needs to create benchmark characters first, and then drive user search to make them pay attention to the live broadcast room.

According to data released by Xiaohongshu, 60% of daily active users actively search in Xiaohongshu every day, with an average daily search query volume of nearly 300 million.

JoJo, the above-mentioned head of beauty brands, believes that Xiaohongshu emphasizes this set of data in order to make brands aware of the commercial value of users' search behavior, thereby increasing the pricing of search ads and driving the growth of advertising revenue. In this way, the two businesses of live broadcast + advertising can be bound and move forward together on the road of commercialization.

Falling to the level of benchmark bloggers, the star blogger who has the most hope of breaking through the 20 million mark at present is the rising idol actor Zhao Lusi.

In terms of the number of fans, Zhao Lusi has accumulated 15.499 million fan attention, and is the star artist with the highest number of fans other than Fan Bingbing on Xiaohongshu. Judging from her notes, almost every data of more than 100,000 likes, coupled with high operating frequency, has made her fans always increase positively. What's more, she is also the heroine of the next head dramas, and the trend of multi-platform fans in the future is unstoppable.

Cicada Xiaohong data on March 10

Of course, compared to Zhao Lusi, for Xiaohongshu, what needs more attention is Dong Jie.

Dong Jie's Xiaohongshu page has updated the information of signing MCN "Haining One Plus One", which belongs to the company of Yixin Entertainment, founded by Yang Tianzhen.

In the latest video updated by Dong Jie, she chatted with Yang Tianzhen and Taobao anchor Lie'er Baobao about the topic of relaxation, and the logo of Dian Tao appeared in the upper left corner of the video. Although Dong Jie has not yet indicated that she may cooperate with Taobao Live, it is temporarily uncertain whether she will be the next target of Taobao Live, given Taobao Live's recent frequent robbery of people from Douyin and cooperation with TVB. At this time, Xiaohongshu needs to be immediately vigilant about how to use the growth of traffic and business support to leave this hard-to-come case "sister".

Going around in circles, Xiaohongshu is still facing the problem of the lack and retention of native bloggers.

Perhaps when Xiaohongshu solves the commercialization problem, these problems will also be solved.