Little Red Book app (XiaoHongShu): Social Media Explained

It’s no secret that China is a powerhouse in the world of social media. With over 1 billion Internet users, it’s home to some of the most popular social media platforms in the world.

We’ll take a look at what might be my favorite platform of them all: Little Red Book / XiaoHongShu.

Heads up, we are a Little Red Book Agency, and this article focus on our own experience while providing you with the information you need to get started.

Quick Summary

• Overview of Little Red Book (Xiaohongshu): Often referred to as the Chinese Instagram, Little Red Book is a social media and e-commerce platform focusing on user-generated content in fashion, beauty, and lifestyle. It targets urban women aged 18 to 35 and has become a favorite among Chinese consumers.
• User Engagement and Content Creation: Users can create posts about lifestyle topics, featuring products or services as recommendations or reviews. The platform’s algorithm suggests content similar to Instagram, fostering a community where users can interact, ask questions, and purchase products.
• Significant User Base: Little Red Book boasts 200 million monthly active users, with a significant portion being post-90s generation and half residing in first-tier cities. The platform categorizes its users into groups like Generation Z, white-collar workers, urban trendsetters, singles, exquisite mothers, and hedonists, aiding targeted marketing efforts.
• Marketing Potential: The app is celebrated for its user-centered approach, with a strong emphasis on authentic user experiences over sales. Influencers and Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) play a crucial role in promoting brands, making it an effective tool for domestic and international companies to enrich shopping experiences and engage with the audience.
• Trust and Authenticity: Little Red Book leverages Chinese consumers’ trust issues by emphasizing word-of-mouth and internet findings over traditional advertising. The platform is known for its authentic product reviews and recommendations, distinguishing it from other e-commerce sites focused on sales.
• E-commerce Integration: The platform includes an e-commerce section, RED Mall, allowing brands to open official accounts and sell products directly within the app. This feature positions Little Red Book as a trustworthy platform for authentic products, addressing the issue of counterfeit goods in China.
• Marketing Strategy Tips: Successful marketing on Little Red Book involves collaborating with KOLs and influencers, utilizing proper keywords for SEO, and adapting content to fit the platform’s unique user preferences and experiences. Simple, spontaneous images and videos, along with engaging text, are recommended to capture the audience’s attention.
• Business Account Registration: The process for businesses to start an account on Little Red Book involves providing detailed company information and undergoing a moderation review. The platform offers a closed shopping cycle, linking users directly to merchants after reading reviews, which simplifies the online shopping experience for high-end goods.

What is Little Red Book?

Little Red Book / Xiaohongshu is a Chinese app that is often called 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 has quickly become a favorite among Chinese consumers, and the app’s developers are planning to expand into other Asian countries soon.

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.

How does the Little Red Book app work?

Users can create posts about general lifestyle topics. Really often they feature some products or services, as a recommendation/review for other users. Other users can then comment on these posts, ask questions, or even purchase products themselves through the app. Xiaohongshu users can find products through their main feed, as the platform’s algorithm works pretty much the same as Instagram in the Western world, showing things they might be interested in.

They can also find topics they are interested in by searching content tags in the recommendation search engine that is built into the app. The app also has a built-in messaging system that is great for connecting Chinese consumers.

Although the app’s strong focus is on e-commerce features, there also is a lot of other quality content for all kinds of users. It’s a great platform for lifestyle images, pretty pictures of places, educational content as well as cross-border e-commerce purposes.

Little Red Book in numbers

The latest data from Little Red Book shows there are 200 million monthly active users, with 72% post-90s and 50% distributed in first-tier cities or larger areas such as second/third-ranked townships within their respective regions across all Chinese provinces.

The Little Red Book provides a concise summary of the various groups that platform users can be divided into, with Generation Z being highlighted.

This young and impressionable demographic is likely to shape society’s future values as they become increasingly exposed to new ideas through technology-driven communication tools such as digital media or social networking sites with a lot of user-generated content. This will undoubtedly have an impact on what kind of person we end up becoming in 20 years time!

The other groups are; cutting-edge white-collar workers, urban trendsetters, singles, exquisite mothers, and hedonists. From the labels of each group, we can see the characteristics of different groups. This division makes it easy for international brands to target their marketing campaigns precisely, as the habits and shopping experiences of each group differ.

How can the Little Red Book App be a useful marketing tool?

Little Red Book or Xiaohongshu is one of the hottest social media platforms, most known for useful content sharing, but also as a cross-border e-commerce platform. Little Red Book App can be a very useful marketing tool because it allows businesses to easily create and share appealing visual content with their followers on social media.

It’s more user-centered than other e-commerce platforms, with KOL (Key Opinion Leader) and KOC (Key Opinion Consumer) influencers promoting domestic and international companies and enriching shopping experiences that make users engage with the brands more than anywhere else.

The app makes it easy to add text, graphics, and filters to photos and videos that you can immediately customize for your needs, which can help businesses to promote and sell products and services in a visually appealing way.

What else makes this social platform such a great e-commerce tool among other multichannel networks?

Xiaohongshu’s users base

Little Red Book / Xiaohongshu has a massive following number of people with a lot of disposable income. They are creating the content of the platform, sharing actively through their social network and so representing an important promotion force for the brands.

Xiaohongshu platform is trying to strengthen this sense of community. Chinese users search for information on Little Red Book, as they know that they will find reviews and recommendations of products they are interested in. Unlike other platforms, this social network’s strong focus is on user preferences and experience, rather than other e-commerce sites that are focused on sales.

Xiahongshu uses Chinese consumers’ trust issues to attract users

Nowadays in China, consumers don’t believe a lot in brands, but they refer to word-of-mouth and what they can find on the internet. While all the internet sources are not reliable, Little Red Book / Xiaohongshu is different because it is based on users’ sharing relevant content.

To market a product or a brand, it can be effective to use this platform, as average hits and comments per post are higher than anywhere else. But you have to manage the communication because bad buzz can also go viral among Chinese consumers and spread to other apps.

RED Mall: The Social E-Commerce Platform

Little Red Book also has an e-commerce section with official accounts and a logistics network. Companies or merchants who have formed a partnership with the platform can start a brand’s official account and sell their products in an online store within the app. Like Tmall or JD in China, Little Red Book / Xiaohongshu is known to sell authentic products on the Chinese market.

In China, counterfeit products still remain a problem for e-commerce. It is important to choose a trustful platform for cooperation in order to save your brand’s reputation among Chinese consumers. Little Red Book is welcoming any foreign brand to start an official account because they can’t only rely on content sharing to develop their business.

Tips to improve your marketing strategies for Little Red Book

Cooperate with Key Opinion Leaders and Influencers

Celebrities and influencers followed by many other users can create content for you and boost foreign brands among Chinese consumers. Little Red Book / Xiaohongshu e-commerce platform itself uses this strategy to reach a bigger audience. The app has become popular thanks to Key Opinion Leaders (comparable to macro-influencers) and Key Opinion Consumers (comparable to micro-influencers).

In fact, many users use the app only to find the inspiration to live a better life, which they see in that such popular personalities.

Chinese consumers have become more discerning and selective than ever, and traditional marketing tactics such as celebrity endorsements and TV advertisements are no longer enough to capture their attention. That’s why it’s better to rely on Key Opinion Leaders and KOCs while working on a marketing strategy for your target market.

Key Opinion Leaders and Key Opinion Consumers usually publish images, videos, and written content to recommend products. These posts are called “notes” on the app. Users truly trust the notes, that in order to be more realistic must not have a commercial flavor.

Make use of proper keywords

To win Little Red Book’s audience among other brands, you must choose the most popular keywords among your target market and then try to let them become viral through collaboration with KOLs and KOCs. Choosing the right keywords for your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is just as important.

A lot of people think they can get by with using too many general terms, but this will backfire on you in an SEO campaign because Baidu ranks specific phrases over nonspecific ones and prefers commonly used words over rare or uncommon ones when ranking pages within its indexing system.

Adapt your content

You need to be aware of the fact that you can’t use the same content for all the other e-commerce platforms, as they all require a unique approach. If on Weibo or WeChat, promotional posts on your official account that tell the history of your brand through the use of high-quality images and videos and creative storytelling can work well, on Little Red Book / Xiaohongshu, they are not a good option.

On the contrary, simple, and spontaneous images and videos are well-accepted. Furthermore, we have another suggestion for you: try to use numbers, exclamation points, and emoticons with attractive colors (red, for example) to let your notes become viral on this social network!

To summarize, we can say that Little Red Book / Xiaohongshu has the capacity to be a platform for e-commerce, and its advantages are in its community of users that you won’t find on any other platform. Considering the competition with Tmall and JD, the two-leading platforms of e-commerce in China, Little Red Book / Xiaohongshu is offering good opportunities nowadays as a growing company.

Link Little Red Book users with your online store

Little Red Book has developed a closed shopping cycle that allows users to purchase items directly from merchants after reading reviews. The company accumulated data on the social and consumption habits of largely urban female customers, then created an online platform for them in order to make it easier than ever before to find high-end goods at affordable prices with all sorts of helpful information about each product’s quality assurance procedures as well!

How to settle on Little Red Book as a third-party business?

There are a few things to consider when settling on Little Red Book as a third-party business. The procedure of starting a business account there is a bit complicated and a Chinese netizen will be needed in the process.

The procedure can be split into a few steps :

The registration process for business on the Little Red Book

You have to register in the Little Red Book’s system (小红书入驻平台) as a merchant or a company. Once you receive your code to log in to the system, you will have to provide information:

• About the company: manager information, the address, the trade pattern (cross-border or inside China), and the product shipping place.
• About the business qualification: by providing business registration, certificate of incorporation, or other company registration file….. For more information about registration on Little Red Book, talk to us!

Your application will be sent to Little Red Book’s moderation team for confirmation. According to the information on its platform, it takes about one week to get the answer.

It is possible to accept the terms of the contract online. Then, after the signature, you have to send it back to the Little Red Book Company. Before entering RED’s platform, each one has to follow and complete the training provided by RED. The time of the achievement depends on you.

Contact us if you need help on Little Red Book

Little Red Book is a reputable, celebrity-approved distributor of overseas products with an eCommerce site that allows customers to share their opinions and comments on Chinese social media.

Brands looking for the perfect way in which they can connect more deeply should consider Little Red Book as one potential option, due to its unique positioning among fans who want authenticity from trusted sources.

We are a digital marketing agency based in Shanghai and we help foreign brands to reach their Chinese consumers. Nowadays, Chinese people have a huge appetite for foreign products, and e-commerce platforms have become the channels of choice for Chinese shoppers looking to purchase such items.

Our agency specializes in marketing in China, and we have a huge experience with Little Red Book. We can help you out by offering consultations, setting up Little Red Book’s official account for your brand, working out a marketing strategy, walking you through e-commerce shopping festival fever, effectively promoting your brand, and so on. Download the app in the IOS app store and check its potential!

Don’t hesitate to leave us a comment or contact us, so that we can schedule a call with one of our experts that will learn about your brand and present you with the best marketing strategy for your brand on Xiaohongshu. Let’s keep in touch!