Douyin "old Chinese medicine", specializing in treating Xiaohongshu

Produced by Tiger Sniff Commercial Consumer Group

Author|Huang Qingchun

Title map|Visual China

A lot of demolition and reconstruction are happening inside Little Red Book.

On March 10, "LatePost" reported that Xiaohongshu will once again upgrade its live broadcast business to an independent department, unified management of live content and live streaming e-commerce and other businesses, and the head of the new department is Yinshi (flower name), who is also the head of Xiaohongshu community ecology. Prior to this, Xiaohongshu's live broadcast business was a business group belonging to the second-level department of the Community Department.

According to Tiger Smell, Conan (flower name), COO of Xiaohongshu in charge of the community department (under the jurisdiction of community business and e-commerce business), took over Xiaohongshu's commercial product team and company technical team in 2022; Prior to this, Xiaohongshu's e-commerce department has undergone several rounds of adjustments, the most recent being in January 2022, when the head of Xiaohongshu e-commerce, Jess, left due to family reasons, and the original community department and e-commerce department merged into a new community department.

In fact, from the "Little Red Book WILL Business Conference" in February to Dong Jie's live broadcast out of the circle in March and the adjustment of Xiaohongshu's organizational structure, Xiaohongshu, which used to be quite low-key, has brushed its presence in the public opinion field, and these topics all point to one source: the weak commercialization of Xiaohongshu.

In particular, the "organizational change" around Xiaohongshu's e-commerce business has been interpreted by the outside world as a phased choice of management on the dispute between commercialization and community: betting on live streaming e-commerce - for a long time, Xiaohongshu has always put community ecology in front of commercialization, but with Xiaohongshu's daily active users about to exceed 100 million, commercialization has become more urgent, because the current market is more concerned about profitability, which is directly related to the life and death of the platform.

Xiaohongshu can't support e-commerce?

From the perspective of review, Xiaohongshu tested e-commerce as early as 2015, and the first stage was the domestic bonded warehouse model, but the scale of GMV was limited; After 2016, it joined hands to build a third-party ecosystem, successively inviting Taobao merchants to settle in, and weakening self-operated e-commerce investment.

Tiger Sniff learned that in the early days, Xiaohongshu tried to invite some KA merchants to undertake performance, and the specific operation ideas were: the platform tilted resources to help brands open stores and package sales to promote investment resources, and Xiaohongshu positioned itself more in the role of product promotion; However, Xiaohongshu is far less attractive to KA merchants than Tmall, and its status is relatively weak, so it has been a drainage tool for Taojie and JD.com for a long time.

In 2021, Xiaohongshu first cut off Taobao external links, and then implemented the "integrated store number" strategy (including brand merchant number, personal brand merchant number, and personal number), claiming that it can "open stores with a "0 threshold", providing a platform for brands to "directly connect consumers" opportunities, and further implemented the "home store opening plan" at the end of 2021 to "show goodwill" to brands that settled in Xiaohongshu.

The logic of Xiaohongshu community e-commerce lies in: on the one hand, attract traffic through good content, and then convert the attracted traffic into brand exposure for sale; On the other hand, attract users' attention, and then assist merchants to do private domain operations through store broadcasts or group chat tools.

However, in 2022, the e-commerce in the Xiaohongshu structure was downgraded from a first-level department to a second-level department. Tiger Sniff learned that after the adjustment, the brand side mainly focuses on two dimensions of data in the evaluation of the delivery effect on Xiaohongshu site: one is interaction data, including three costs: CPC - cost per click, CPM - exposure cost (the cost of advertising expenses required for brand exposure 1000 times), CPE - interaction cost (data such as likes, comments, collections, retweets and other data obtained by influencers publishing a piece of content according to the needs of the brand side); The other is Tmall, Taobao's store UV, it is worth noting that Xiaohongshu cooperated with Taobao Alliance (Taobao Alliance) to launch the "Little Red Star" project, the operation logic is for the brand to release the recruitment plan to the Taobao Alliance, and then agents or experts go to the Taobao Alliance to claim the needs released by the brand.

According to the minutes of experts in Jiuqian Zhongtai, Xiaohongshu's beauty and personal care, fashion, mother and baby, and food categories will have the best commercial development momentum in 2022, of which beauty and personal care account for 30% ~ 40%, fashion, mother and baby, and food each account for 10% ~ 20%; During the epidemic, the life record category increased the most, 10% ~ 20%, and the sports and fitness category also increased significantly, but the increase was less than 5%. Tiger Sniff immediately asked Xiaohongshu officials for confirmation of this data, and received a response: "This data is untrue."

The reason why the category with good growth momentum can run, Tiger Sniff learned that the link from the brand's transaction on Xiaohongshu is divided into two categories:

One is to make KOL matrix recommendations according to the merchant's products and budget, KOL for product selling point publicity (dandelion cooperation has brands exposed), users go to Taobao to search after planting grass; At the execution level, the brand side buys the talent that matches the brand on the dandelion platform, the talent tweets according to the needs of the brand side, and the brand side then puts and "heats" the grass notes through the information flow;

The other is that the brand side uses Xiaohongshu to grow grass to enhance its popularity, and the brand can hang a link in the promotion, and you can jump directly to Xiaohongshu Mall to buy. For example, brands such as Estée Lauder, Membrane Law Family, Red Elephant and so on, there is a brand label in the lower left corner of the expert note, and when users click on the brand name, they will jump to their Xiaohongshu official account, which is one of the links to the transaction in Xiaohongshu.

In this regard, Conan, COO of Little Red Book, told Tiger Sniff after the Little Red Book WILL business conference: Behind Xiaohongshu planting grass is the game between merchants and user preferences, algorithms, and platform ecology.

"The grass value of Xiaohongshu's content ecology comes from the sharing of ordinary users and high-quality bloggers based on real experience. In the past, brands lacked observation and measurement indicators, tended to use simple like data to beat articles, and there were many search results SEO to dominate the screen to seize the search results. As a platform, what Xiaohongshu needs to do is to build an infrastructure for scientific grass planting based on the user's already ubiquitous grass planting behavior - helping businesses, brands and consumers communicate, so that grass planting can really be planted in the hearts of consumers. Conan said.

In particular, when the consumption supply is excessive, Xiaohongshu is like a real-time update "life manual" for specific problems in life - although the content is unstructured, behind the content is the insight of the user's willingness to consume (such as the depth of behavior including the user's interest in the product, multiple browsing records, etc.), and the consumption decision-making value of the user's anti-UGC naturally evolves into a barrier. For example, "Daddy's love is in the search box, Mom's love is in favorites" on Xiaohongshu is essentially a consumer appeal reflected by the difference in users' active behavior.

In 2023, Xiaohongshu also launched TrueInterest grass value, trying to quantify the value of grass cultivation by capturing the depth and active behavior characteristics of Xiaohongshu users. The underlying logic of TrueInterest is: go back to the user behavior link to understand planting, help brands/merchants better understand users' product intentions, not just content preferences, so that brands can gain certainty based on data analysis.

You know, the reason why the live broadcast business can become an independent department of Xiaohongshu again in 2023, on the one hand, stems from the possibility that it is reshaping the Xiaohongshu community and commercialization; On the other hand, the management sees the huge potential of the live e-commerce scene to complete the planting + consumption in a short period of time, so Xiaohongshu aims to cultivate the e-commerce business into the second growth curve of the platform.

Little Red Book "body void", Douyin into "partial square"?

In 2023, another noteworthy action of Xiaohongshu is: the "shopping" column that was upgraded to a first-level entrance in 2022, and now the entrance has been replaced by "video" in the latest version of Xiaohongshu; And the Xiaohongshu video column is highly similar to the mainstream short video platform: single-column information flow, swipe up and down to switch videos, and transfer like and comment functions.

It is not difficult to see that Xiaohongshu has made a breakthrough in commercialization and content ecology, and Douyin has become its best sample. As Meituan founder and CEO Wang Xing said, it is the norm for new and old giants to test the hinterland of others for business innovation, and frequently meet each other. "Combat is just going from one battlefield to another, from one opportunity to another, there is always constant change."

Although Xiaohongshu launched "Channels" as early as three years ago (2020), when the homepage recommendation information stream would alternately appear graphics and short videos, directly increasing the priority of video entry is tantamount to increasing the weight of video on the site, which means that the priority of short videos on Xiaohongshu's product side is constantly increasing.

On the one hand, as a MAU of 260 million, the per capita daily use time has increased from 26.49 minutes (2018) to 55.31 minutes (2022) 55.31 minutes of track head products, Xiaohongshu official data shows that 60% of daily active users will actively search in Xiaohongshu every day, with an average daily search query volume of nearly 300 million times, which is undoubtedly a huge "advertising fertile soil".

Tiger Sniff learned that Xiaohongshu's traffic mainly comes from two blocks, one is Xiaohongshu's discovery page, and the recommended information flow of thousands of people, which accounts for nearly 60% of the overall traffic of the platform; Second, the traffic through the search ingress accounts for about 40%. Among them, the CTR (click-through rate) of search ads is generally higher than the pricing of information flow ads, so Xiaohongshu emphasizes that search is one of the highest frequency behaviors of its platform users, in order to drive the growth of advertising business revenue.

"LatePost" wrote that in 2023, Xiaohongshu will also focus on increasing the proportion of performance advertising, including attracting more brands to enter Xiaohongshu e-commerce and conducting e-commerce live broadcasts, so that their advertising directly converts on Xiaohongshu.

On the other hand, the trend of short videos has become unstoppable, not so much that Xiaohongshu chooses "short video", but that "Douyin" has become the biggest common divisor of market choice - as Zhiyin, vice president of Douyin, said: "Douyin is not a short video, not a live broadcast, nor a graphic text, and any kind of content theme cannot summarize Douyin." Douyin is a human-centered visual expression and is a service that serves different authors, users and brands. ”

In view of this, in the narrative inertia of traffic leading the tide, Douyin is fierce and decisive. Looking back at the dozens of tracks that Byte has moved around, it has run steep curves in short video entertainment, live broadcast e-commerce, and local life, which is the confidence of Byte to still maintain an attacker's posture and fearlessly expand - but this does not prevent ByteDance from copying Xiaohongshu's "homework", which has successively launched "new grass" and "croissant" independent APP, which is coveting Xiaohongshu's "planting grass" model.

Driven by "content + social", Xiaohongshu has a purchase conversion much higher than the industry average under the endorsement of KOL + KOC dual-drive, and the buyer repurchase rate is also higher than the industry average, forming a unique consumption field, and Xiaohongshu UGC content precipitation and user loyalty are very high, and it is difficult for users to migrate their minds and usage habits; Secondly, the double column can also enrich the granularity of behavior evaluation when users are exposed to content, thereby providing brands with richer user tags and delivery scenarios.

Taking Dong Jie's live streaming data as an example, according to Xiaohongshu's official data, the number of live broadcast viewers that night exceeded 2.2 million, ranking first in popularity for 6 consecutive hours, with a cumulative GMV of more than 30 million yuan; According to the e-commerce live streaming data released by Xiaohongshu, the number of Xiaohongshu e-commerce live broadcast anchors increased by 337% year-on-year in 2022, and the number of live broadcast sessions increased by 214% year-on-year; Going back further, the "2021 New Media Content Ecology Data Report" shows that 57.6% of Xiaohongshu's tail accounts have been launched in 2021, more than twice as many as other platforms.

In this regard, Xiaohongshu CMO Zhiheng told Tiger Sniff after the Xiaohongshu WILL business conference that good products can take into account brand recognition and transform transactions into brand energy storage through effective grass planting. "The ranking of the importance of research on the key influencing factors of Xiaohongshu users' purchase decisions is product quality, self-pleasing to themselves, cost performance, product design/innovation, public reputation, brand, price, and trends."

"In the past year, Xiaohongshu has built around the SPU commodity granularity database to help brands achieve product-based insights in different industries and product lines, so that they can better understand consumers and industries. Because Xiaohongshu is a natural UGC field, there are a large number of unstructured users actively expressed, which is different from the data of the company's own research, and is very valuable in terms of authenticity, richness and freshness. Zhiheng said.

People close to Douyin told Tiger that the Douyin e-commerce team once believed that it could learn from Xiaohongshu's two major advantages of grass planting and content marketing: on the one hand, Douyin focuses on drainage and user population growth to land on products, continuously enriches user portraits in historical UG (user growth), and reconstructs users' potential consumption demands; On the other hand, Douyin actively promotes the effective introduction of Xiaohongshu's internal influencers and e-commerce service providers (DPs), thereby promoting Xiaohongshu's DP resources to feed back its e-commerce ecosystem.

In this regard, Zhiheng stressed to Tiger Sniff that although other platforms learning Xiaohongshu are also pushing graphics and texts, Xiaohongshu is unique in that the content form of Xiaohongshu short graphics and text has undergone many iterations and established a differentiated consumption field and community culture.

"Xiaohongshu will directly do a data connection with enterprises, such as the CRM of enterprise consumer customers, how overlap between the customers they trade and Xiaohongshu users, the portraits of these customers, etc.; Secondly, these overlapping users can be connected with the brand in Xiaohongshu before purchase, purchase decision-making habits, preferences, and in-depth consumption behavior. Zhiheng said.