Xiaohongshu:China’s Hottest Social Media

As the most populous country, China has a strong economy and economic leadership that has been attracting investment from global brands. When it comes to E-commerce in China, many people immediately think of Taobao or Tmall, but today’s core millennial user base is more interested in the recent rise of a social shopping platform: Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book in English).

Xiaohongshu is more like a hybrid of Pinterest, Amazon and TripAdvisor, but it is completely unique. Xiaohongshu offers a great opportunity for marketers to connect with Chinese customers, especially the female demographic . With the convergence and multiplication of Xiaohongshu KOLs and live marketing, brands from different industries are able to achieve the best sales from social commerce, especially fashion and beauty, travel and food. In this post, you will be able to learn more about how to leverage Xiaohongshu as a social commerce channel for brands to stand out in the highly competitive Chinese market.

What Is Xiaohongshu

Xiaohongshu, often known as Little Red book, a Chinese social media platform, focuses on a unique model of user-generated content, E-commerce and community building, while also featuring images, text, videos and live streaming to co-create appealing content to users, such as beauty, fashion, food, travel, fitness and more.

As one of the fastest growing platforms in recent years, Xiaohongshu has over 100 million monthly active users, of which more than four-fifths are Millennials and Gen Z youth. Therefore, it has grown to become China’s largest content hub and social E-commerce platform, targeting trend-focused and affluent consumers.

Why Xiaohongshu Is A Magnet for Users?

If you compare Xiaohongshu to a city, it is a trendy metropolitan area with a large young population that values the quality of products and has strong purchasing power, and is an effective platform for promoting and selling skincare, cosmetics and fashion products. It gathers keen consumers who research and review products extensively on the app.

Young, High-Purchasing Power Demographic

If you want to use Xiaohongshu for your business, it is important to know that unlike other social media, Xiaohongshu is especially popular among young people (Generation Z), as 70% of its users were born after the 1990s. Moreover, 80% of the users are young Chinese women that mostly rely on KOLs recommendations instead of just buying products from famous international brands. They live in 1st and 2nd tier cities, which means that most of the platform’s users have a higher purchasing power than other platforms’ users. They are interested in buying foreign mid to high-end products, especially cosmetics. Thanks to Xiaohongshu, users are able to watch live-streaming videos while clicking on the links embedded in live to buy the products that are used by the KOL.

Engaging Online Community

Instead of cheap wholesale goods, Xiaohongshu offers premium quality and exclusivity; it has built a highly-engaged community of savvy users who research and review their products extensively on the app. Xiaohongshu is an ecommerce platform, yes, but more than that, it’s a trusted source of advice and recommendations for its community of fashion and beauty lovers, and has even managed to build a following among some of China’s biggest influencers.

All of these factors have combined to make Xiaohongshu one of China’s most popular and successful ecommerce apps, with more than 100 million users as of May 2018, and a recent Series D funding round valuing the app at $3 billion.

Trustworthy Word-of-mouth Marketing

The app’s user-generated content led to the emergence of several Key-Opinion Leaders (KOLs) becoming active on the platform. Similar to KOLs (Influencers) on Instagram, most of them share useful tips and interesting content about beauty and lifestyle. These KOLs work with brands to promote products to followers resulting in increased brand awareness, user engagement, and followers.

How Can Your Brands Take Full Advantage of Xiaohongshu?

Build A Verified Account

Having a verified account on Xiaohongshu is mandatory if you want to sell your products on the platform. Chinese consumers are quite cautious when it comes to brands that they have never heard of. Thus, if you have an official account, they will be more confident. Xiaohongshu is like other e-commerce platforms such as Tmall, JD.com, Taobao, WeChat, you will need to gain Chinese consumers’ trust. However, the particularity of Xiaohongshu is that individual vendors are not able to open their own stores.

Traditional Display Advertisements

Along with the influencer marketing platform, XiaoHongShu also introduced its official advertising packages for brands who are in favour of traditional marketing. There are two types of paid advertisements – ads that pop-up upon app-opening or ads integrated within the explore page feed, both of which can help to increase exposure and click through. Once clicked, users are directed to a dedicated promotion page or a specific post. The advertisement is very useful for a new product launch or promotional activities.

RED Stores

In 2014, following its growing success and popularity, Xiaohongshu launched its own cross-border e-commerce platform: ‘RED Store’. Thanks to that new functionality, Chinese consumers were able to purchase overseas products from international brands directly through the app. If you want to sell your products on Xiaohongshu, you will have the choice between opening your own store or selling your products directly through the platform. However, you will have more benefits by opening your own store in terms of branding, marketing, communication and control of your activities.

By opening your RED store, you will be able to promote your products as well as to sell them directly to consumers who will just have to click on the product and pay online. It is also a great way to do your promotional campaign by creating impactful and creative ads.