In the simplified Chinese internet community that consisted of social platforms and general E-commerce platforms, Little Red Book (Xiao Hong Shu) stands out as the Chinese Instagram.
The app, which is based on the popular book of the same name, focuses on user-generated content, mostly in the area of fashion, beauty, and lifestyle.
Little Red Book app’s target demographic is mostly urban women aged 18 to 35 years old. The app started as a product review platform, where users were looking for luxury fashion and beauty products from overseas as well share their latest shopping tips with others on board.
The platform also features swapping ideas about what looks good in real life or digitally and this user-generated content is gaining more and more attention from marketers, that want to leverage the app for marketing purposes.
GMA | Little Red Book app (XiaoHongShu): Social Media Explained.
Slight different from Instagram is that Little Red Book is more informative–instagram posts are picture-driven and conveys mostly emotions and status. For Little Red Book though, texts and pictures carry equal weights and its posts are more informative. Can be short tutorials sometimes.
A platform’s initial aspire and design shape its user behavior and contents. Even tiny tweaks in the recommendation algorithm would be propagates into huge market response–when the market is proportionally huge and users are active and somehow strategic. It’s like riding a wave, while enjoying the chill, be ware not to drown.
A recent article analyzed the phenomenon of eye-capturing-confounding headlines. It covers detailed aspects of how platform’s design boosted user participation as well as misaligned incentives for growing amount of low-quality posts.
The Little Red Book (Xiaohongshu) has become an intriguing product, increasingly popular among my peers. Many young colleagues in my company have turned to it for advice on various topics. Whether it’s choosing a beginner hiking route, finding a cost-effective hospital for wisdom teeth extraction, or debating whether to add sugar to scrambled eggs with tomatoes, Xiaohongshu is their go-to resource.
Generally, people favor Xiaohongshu over ChatGPT as a life consultant because it provides richer life experiences. As you might have noticed, ChatGPT tends to be overly logical, often offering extensive, verbatim lists of suggestions. Xiaohongshu has achieved high user engagement by lowering barriers for content creators, tailoring its recommendation algorithms to favor smaller creators, and transforming comment sections into content. These efforts have paid off, though not without costs:
- Core Demand of Xiaohongshu: Beyond short video entertainment, users crave content based on real-life experiences. Experience, with its subjective nature, often holds more value than objective knowledge. This premise underlies Xiaohongshu’s popularity—it provides useful, searchable personal insights.
- Popularity Beyond Algorithms: While the recommender system plays a significant role in the success of platforms like Xiaohongshu and Jitterbug, another critical factor is their ability to lower content production costs. As of early 2023, Xiaohongshu boasted 260 million active monthly users, with creators making up 7%. This significant creator engagement is a testament to its accessible content creation tools.
- Accessibility of Content Creation: Xiaohongshu simplifies content creation by emphasizing visuals over text. Users don’t need advanced writing skills; basic photo-taking and simple editing suffice. This lower barrier to entry mirrors Jitterbug’s approach, both platforms significantly reducing the cost of content production.
- Simplified Editing Tools: Xiaohongshu’s editor is intentionally basic, lacking features like bold text, color changes, or font customization. This simplicity is by design, aimed at reducing production costs and keeping the focus on easy content creation.
- Innovative Editing Features: Xiaohongshu integrates unique features like “text-to-image” capabilities, allowing users to transform text into styled images, further easing the content creation process.
- Shift in Content Consumption: Content on Xiaohongshu, particularly in tech, is not only abundant but engaging and interactive, often generating better engagement than other platforms. This suggests a migration of users’ content consumption habits towards more dynamic and community-interactive platforms.
- Comments as Content: Xiaohongshu capitalizes on the concept of ‘comments as content’. Simple posts can generate hundreds of comments, which themselves become a form of content, lowering the threshold for creating engaging material.
- Cultural Expressions and Trends: Common expressions like “ah ah ah ah ah!!” reflect a cultural trend on Xiaohongshu towards exaggerated emotions, often used to grab attention in a sea of content.
- Challenges with Clickbait: The necessity for eye-catching titles is understandable from a content producer’s perspective. However, the platform’s lack of action against or encouragement of sensationalist titles risks damaging its community culture over time.
- Support for Emerging Bloggers: Xiaohongshu’s recommendation system aims to support bloggers with fewer than 1,000 fans, helping prevent a Matthew effect. However, for content creators, the reliance on this system for content visibility can feel daunting.
Xiaohongshu’s appeal is broadening, attracting not just a female audience but an increasing number of male users as well. Many of my male friends use the app to look up gym tutorials or find hospital recommendations–yes, the platform’s location-based recommendations make it easy to access relevant information tailored to one’s local community. Interestingly, it has also become a space where some boys browse for images of sexy girls, cleverly training the algorithm to cater to their preferences in a platform originally designed for shopping and sharing product experiences, so that you can imagine that those images are abundant in supply compared to other men-extensive platforms such as Hu Pu (a sport-game comment platform that one can imagine is almost dominated by boys).
It looks like Little Red Book has a page for everyone. Although it has its problem, at least for now, the platform design nutured the cutest tale of community, curiosity, and sometimes, just a splash of cheekiness.