Little Red Book (Xiaohongshu) is a lifestyle platform and consumer decision portal. As of October 2019, Little Red Book has over 100 million monthly active users. In the Xiaohongshu community, users record the positive energy and good life of young people in this era through the sharing of text, pictures and video notes, and Little Red Book uses machine learning to accurately and efficiently match massive amounts of information and people. It also has an e-commerce business under its banner.
Today, Little Red Book incorporates a range of functions, including text and image posts, videos, live streaming, and an e-commerce store. The majority of Little Red Book users are young (most born post-1990), middle-class women living in first and second-tier cities. The most popular topics are cosmetics and skincare, fashion, and travel and food.
A large number of middle-class users makes Little Red Book an ideal platform for UK fashion and beauty brands that target affluent trend-seeking consumers. Chinese consumers are very review conscious and like to do their research online before making a purchase, especially if it is a brand they have not purchased before. Little Red Book’s user-generated review content has a reputation for authenticity and the resulting ratings can have a significant impact on brand awareness and even sales. Little Red Book has a conversion rate of 8% compared to 2-3% on other e-commerce platforms.
Brands can use Little Red Book in three ways:
Create an official account, open a branded e-commerce shop, or partner with influencers to promote their products. Official brand accounts can create posts and videos just like regular accounts and interact with other users through likes and comments. Posts that are informative, detailed and with lots of relatable images usually perform well, rather than flashy, heavily branded content. A brand’s account homepage will also show posts tagged by other users, much like Instagram, and will bridge the gap between branded and user-generated content.
Brands can open e-commerce shops directly through Little Red Book, which can link directly to their homepage. Posts have links directly to shops within the platform, which also offers support in logistics, customer service and data insights.
Brands may also consider seeding their offerings to the many micro-influencers or key opinion creators on Little Red Book. Similar to micro-influencers on western social media platforms such as Instagram, these users may have a smaller following, but they tend to have a higher engagement rate and the content they create is more organic. The lower cost of investment in such influencers can also be beneficial to smaller brands or companies looking to test the market for the first time in China.
Wishful can offer European brands the business of placing and managing ads on Little Red Book as a way to increase their presence in China and help them open up the Chinese market.
