The spoiler Little Red Book grabbed the food: rushed to the last train with the live broadcast

Source: Time Weekly Author: Tu Mengying

Xiaohongshu is trying to find a future in the live streaming business. "60% of users search Xiaohongshu frequently every day, with an average daily search query volume of nearly 300 million times, Xiaohongshu has become the life search entrance of ordinary people.

At the recent Xiaohongshu WILL business conference, Xiaohongshu COO Conan revealed the above data, she frankly said that effective product planting grass can be associated with brand recognition value and conversion transaction value, and store water and brand energy storage for transactions.

To some extent, this is the first time in 10 years that Xiaohongshu grass community has emphasized the link between effective grass cultivation and transaction transformation. This seems to mean that Xiaohongshu began to look directly at the situation of "starting with planting grass and being trapped in pulling grass".

"Little Red Book does not guarantee business growth." Xu Han (pseudonym), a promotion manager of a domestic beauty brand, told the Times reporter. A typical situation is: many brands do investment on Xiaohongshu, the purpose is more to obtain traffic, about further conversion, subconsciously pinned on other e-commerce platforms.

Little Red Book is determined to make a bigger shift. In March 2023, some media reported that Xiaohongshu made structural adjustments, upgraded the live broadcast business to an independent department, and unified management of live streaming content and live streaming e-commerce. Previously, Xiaohongshu's live broadcast business belonged to the second-level department business group under the Community Department.

This has led the outside world to speculate that Xiaohongshu will bet on the live broadcast business and made a choice between the graphic community and the video business.

A founder of a company focusing on Xiaohongshu content operation told the Times reporter that Xiaohongshu's graphic reading is better than video reading, and strategy and functional content are more popular. Video content naturally has no sorting properties, if Xiaohongshu wants to push videos, it must abandon graphics and texts and give up existing advantages.

"The graphic community is the basic plate, and Xiaohongshu does not intend to weaken the form of graphics and text." Industry insiders familiar with Xiaohongshu told the Times reporter that Xiaohongshu still maintains the usefulness of the community to provide value to users, and will develop e-commerce business in a way of content integration.

For the current Xiaohongshu, any changes are closely related to the situation - users and traffic on social platforms are constantly being eroded and divided by video, and Xiaohongshu has not yet run a clear path for commercial monetization. Under the huge impact of the video, Xiaohongshu urgently needs to change.

Tilt to break the equilibrium point

From the outside world, Xiaohongshu is facing challenges.

As a platform full of sharing shopping notes, Xiaohongshu can meet the needs of users, but it cannot generate more immediate two-way interaction, and even if it has a complete and clear strategy tutorial, it is difficult to achieve direct positive feedback of efficiency.

"Little Red Book's delivery does not see concrete results." Xu Han said that when the project she is in charge of is promoted by Xiaohongshu, the usual practice is to cater to node promotions. In Xu Hankou, most nodes are divided into different echelons according to importance, such as 618, Double 12 and other promotion categories, as well as 3.8 Women's Day, Valentine's Day, etc., and the brand is promoted according to phased publicity.

"Many brands prefer to put their money where they can." But no matter what kind of node it is paired with, in Xu Han's view, it is just "ensuring exposure without seeking ROI".

A number of industry veterans told the Times reporter that Xiaohongshu is difficult to build an ideal business closed loop, which is the biggest challenge in its development so far. This is undoubtedly related to the grass planting logic that Xiaohongshu has built around the community.

"First of all, what is Little Red Book? Xiaohongshu is the largest sharing lifestyle community, and they will check in with Xiaohongshu every day, what to eat, wear and drink every day. In 2018, Xiaohongshu co-founder Qu Fang defined it in a public speech.

But to some extent, this also made Xiaohongshu entangled for a long time - how to balance content ecology and commercialization.

Liu Jia (pseudonym), a brand person in charge of Xiaohongshu's operations, told the Times reporter that Xiaohongshu's delivery genes cannot avoid advertising notes, and many brands package notes into evaluation experiences to mislead consumers, causing consumers to gradually doubt the authenticity of content.

"Over time, consumers develop a sense of distrust, which is obviously detrimental to the subsequent development of the platform." She said.

In order to reduce user disgust, Xiaohongshu once chose to "open the skylight and say bright words". In 2021, Xiaohongshu promoted the process of cooperation between bloggers and brands, and officially launched the "Dandelion" platform, and Xiaohongshu also took commissions from it separately, trying to control the scale of commercialization.

Source: Company official website

"Xiaohongshu takes the route of respecting users, but this kind of hard and wide official filing is often not liked by brands and users." Liu Jia believes that for brands, the cost of promotion is raised when the results are unknown; For consumers, it is a common attitude to brush off advertising notes.

"More often than not, brands need to bypass Xiaohongshu and work privately with bloggers." Xu Han also revealed that the brand side hopes that the content blogger will fit with the brand spirit and concept, but it does not show the meaning of advertising too much, arousing consumers' desire to buy the brand, similar to the "talent version of TVC".

The "compromise" became apparent from this year. In January 2023, the dandelion platform brand cooperation logo was upgraded to "brand mark component", allowing brands to choose whether to hide the advertising logo. At this WILL business conference, Xiaohongshu launched "TrueInterest", saying that it will achieve measurable and optimizable grass marketing by quantifying the depth and active behavior of Xiaohongshu users.

Compared with the previous wavering, Little Red Book's scales seem to be tilting to the side.

Closed loop, no more restraint

In the past 10 years, Xiaohongshu has taken advantage of the huge traffic of the Internet and has become one of the most representative social giants in China. A set of data shows that Xiaohongshu, which has more than 200 million monthly active users, is second only to WeChat, QQ and Weibo in the ranking of communication social apps in 2022.

Xiaohongshu does not really want to be just a platform for sharing shopping.

In the "Chronicle" of Xiaohongshu's official website, Xiaohongshu started by focusing on overseas shopping and sharing. Around 2013, Qu Fang and Mao Wenchao, who quit their white-collar jobs in foreign companies, planned to start a business. At that time, Mao Wenchao, who had just returned from his MBA at Stanford, wanted to do the Internet and travel track, but Qu Fang, a shopaholic, believed that the relatively blank overseas shopping market in China was more promising.

To some extent, in Qu Fang's eyes, Xiaohongshu's predecessor overseas shopping strategy was a product of rapid trial and error. Later, the two founders found that it was difficult to solve the problem of information asymmetry in cross-border shopping by relying on PGC and Daren, so the "Xiaohongshu Shopping Notes" APP was launched.

Source: Company official website

Lily recalls the first time she used Little Red Book, and the phrase "discover the good things of the world" still rings in her ears.

"At the beginning, almost all foreign skin care products to cosmetics and beauty products were bought in Xiaohongshu, with more than dozens of orders." Because she likes overseas big brands, Lili was once a loyal user of Xiaohongshu e-commerce.

When domestic and overseas shopping websites have not yet risen rapidly, Xiaohongshu has ushered in rapid progress. In June 2017, Xiaohongshu's third "66th Anniversary Celebration Promotion" exceeded 100 million sales within 2 hours of sales, ranking first in the Apple App Store shopping category.

Now, Lili, who opened the Xiaohongshu APP, found that the last order had long been stuck 5 years ago.

"Around 2018, there were more and more shopping apps that could be used to shop for overseas shopping, and for a while I even uninstalled it." Zhang Lili said.

An e-commerce person who did not want to be named analyzed to the Times reporter that because Xiaohongshu lacks the genes and experience of e-commerce operations, especially cross-border e-commerce, the development of cross-border e-commerce business cannot be called successful.

"Xiaohongshu has tried many changes, whether it is to weaken the investment in self-operated e-commerce, join forces to build a third-party ecology, or launch an integrated operation model of the number store to try to provide brands with direct access to consumers, but the results do not seem to be obvious." The above-mentioned e-commerce analysts believe that Xiaohongshu is actually not good at e-commerce, let alone form its own advantages.

At the end of 2021, Xiaohongshu CEO Mao Wenchao said at an internal meeting that Xiaohongshu's growth comes from the community, and trading is an important part of community life, so it is necessary to put e-commerce in the community, the user's consumption mind should be cultivated in the community, and the transaction ecology of merchants should also be produced in the community.

After a series of reflections and changes, Xiaohongshu chose to grasp sovereignty. In 2022, Xiaohongshu will make organizational adjustments to the e-commerce department, and the original community department and e-commerce department will be merged. Subsequently, Xiaohongshu issued the "Community Business Convention" to clarify the determination to do on-site transactions, emphasizing that transactions cannot be guided off-site in personal pages, comments, private messages and other scenarios.

Spoil the situation, back the water

Another obvious gradual change is Xiaohongshu's offensive attitude towards live streaming e-commerce.

Dong Jie, who has disappeared from the entertainment industry for a long time, has suddenly ranked first in Xiaohongshu in recent times. According to a set of data released by Xiaohongshu, on February 24, Dong Jie's second live broadcast was broadcast continuously for 6 hours, with more than 2.2 million views and a single live broadcast sales of more than 30 million.

"Dong Jie's live broadcast is more in line with the direction of Xiaohongshu, focusing on providing a lifestyle for exquisite life, and the style of the entire live broadcast room is very comfortable, and it will not be like Douyin, Kuaishou and other 'hawking' or 'shopping guide' directions." According to Xu Han's observation, Dong Jie's overall data on goods is very impressive, and the things sold are not cheap.

In Xu Han's view, the selection of products in Dong Jie's live broadcast room is exquisite, the price and category are close to the sharing of good things used by celebrities, and combined with the approachable live broadcast atmosphere, consumers feel like a kind of girlfriends and friends sharing. "Xiaohongshu loyal users may be more receptive to this style, that is, it does not damage Xiaohongshu's tonality, and it also successfully advertises and brings goods for the brand."

Little Red Book's increasingly obvious signal is to explore more possibilities with live streaming.

In order to combat this new business war, Xiaohongshu recently launched the "Fashion Spark Plan", which 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. At the same time, Xiaohongshu also announced a set of positive data: the number of e-commerce live broadcast anchors and live broadcast sessions in 2022 increased by 337% and 214% year-on-year, respectively.

It's just that Xiaohongshu, who has no first-mover advantage in admission, faces a strong opponent.

Zi Jian (pseudonym), a senior practitioner in the live broadcast industry who is active in the front line, revealed to the Times reporter that in the current competitive landscape of the three-point world (Douyin, Kuaishou, Taobao), Xiaohongshu's e-commerce live broadcast needs to be attractive and must make strong differentiation.

However, Zijian believes that Xiaohongshu's live broadcast business is still in the initial stage of development, and the platform still needs to focus on cultivating and supporting anchors at this stage.

"When most users receive information from the platform in the early days, they go from exclusion to early adopters, and eventually they are slowly infiltrate. Douyin did not waver during this period, and the subsequent embedding of product links in short videos and follow-up live streaming were more like natural success, which allowed users to understand and take (order) actions. Zijian used Douyin as an example, for this, Xiaohongshu is currently unable to do it.

"Have a wait-and-see attitude towards Xiaohongshu's e-commerce live broadcast." Xu Han remembered that in 2020, Xiaohongshu had just emerged as a store broadcast, and the entire team she was in charge of were newcomers and chose to give up after a month of trial broadcasting of Xiaohongshu. "Because the overall transaction was not good, basically no one bought it, I just remember that the highest live broadcast reached 13,000 people, but the final product sales were only single digits."

"Xiaohongshu users have not yet formed video habits, let alone live broadcasts." The founder of the above-mentioned operating company said frankly that the industry competitors are too strong, and Xiaohongshu has to push money and attract fans, and also take into account the in-depth services of the supply chain such as logistics and suppliers. “

All indications are that Little Red Book is undoubtedly a predator. According to iMedia consulting report, in 2020, the GMV of Douyin live streaming e-commerce exceeded 500 billion yuan, and Taobao exceeded 400 billion yuan; Kuaishou e-commerce business GMV is 381.2 billion yuan, while Xiaohongshu's GMV is less than 7 billion yuan.

Little Red Book's tentacles are still extending. At the beginning of 2023, Xiaohongshu also set up a local life advertising team to continuously explore commercialization paths related to live broadcasting. It is not difficult to see that the "last train" of this live broadcast with goods, Xiaohongshu is determined to catch up.