Have you ever wondered if your business could be marketed to the Chinese community effectively through an Instagram-like platform with a marketplace that enables instant sales transactions?
RED, also known as Xiaohongshu or Little Red Book, is one of the most popular Chinese social media platforms. It currently has over 100 million monthly active users and is officially known as a "unicorn company", because its value has exceeded USD 3 billion in 2019.
With a massive amount of user-generated content which provides product recommendations, it is also a cross-border eCommerce platform that effectively attracts both local and Mainland Chinese consumers.
Therefore, to help you understand the RED platform to build a brand reputation among Chinese audiences and sustain long-term relationships with them, this article would explain why it is practical to use RED in your marketing strategy. We would first introduce the RED functional framework and its user demographics and then demonstrate the primary account management strategy for your business to grow the audience traffic based on the RED algorithm.
Why use RED to break into the local Chinese Community?
RED is a promising E-commerce platform in the retail ecosystem, especially on the fashion and beauty industry. When RED held its shopping festival to celebrate its fourth anniversary, the sales revenue exceeded 100 million RMB in only two hours and the app hit the top of App Store ratings in the "shopping" category. The number of registered users is rapidly growing due to the platform's reliability.
The platform is a community of users discovering new brands and sharing their feedback with other users. Users are encouraged to write comments, product reviews, or shopping tips and upload photos of the products they've bought or tried. Key Opinion Leaders (KOL) are industry experts who spread the products recommendation through creative content on social media that contribute to marketing campaigns.
Hence, there is much potential to break into the local Chinese market with RED as it has already gathered a large number of like-minded potential consumers on the platform. The 'word of mouth' marketing is very effective with the interactive content creation features, such as live streaming and lucky draw on RED, which keep consumers engaged with the brands.
3 Key Components in Understanding RED
Functional Framework
RED's brand proposition is to act as the platform for users to share their favourite products, life hacks, and gather like-minded users to live the exquisite lifestyle together.
Media technology allows cross-border connections online; consumers can create contents to recommend products to everyone in the global market. Brands from all over the world can reach Chinese consumers and vice versa. It is the perfect opportunity for retailers and foreign brands to expand its market regardless of geographical limitation.
Besides, everyone can share their reviews of the shopping experience and testimonials on RED, and the contents shown to each user is a result of the calculation of the algorithm, this consumer-bubble was derived from the previous searches, likes, and collections of posts of the user for them to find their preferred products efficiently.
The Chinese community trust user generated content because they are genuine real-life purchases and user experiences. Users would prefer to engage with brands on this eCommerce platform because the creative
promotional features facilitate the genuine relationship building with brands.
Therefore, RED stands out as an effective marketing promotion platform to enter the Chinese market with lower barriers to create brand advertising content for consumers, wide-spreading "word-of-mouth" and online features to interact with consumers to form long-term relationship.
User Group Analysis
Approximately 87% of users on RED are females, with 40% age range 24 years old and below, and close to 30% users' age range between 25-30 years old. The data revealed that the consumers on RED practice middle-class to luxury spending.
According to the diagram below, half of the Chinese community in Australia aged range between 25-40 years old, and 25% of the Chinese community aged between 15-24 years old utilise RED, which shows that RED not only is a popular social media platform in Mainland China but also within the local Chinese community in Australia.
Procedures to set up a RED Account
What You Need To Know Before Setting Up An Account:
RED records your phone number.
If you previously registered for a RED account with your current phone number, the platform remembers your phone and any content/data related to the account you had before, and those data would be saved for user preference analysis when you register for a new account.
RED records your phone IMEI
Even if you register a new phone number or the new account on your phone, which previously has RED, the platform will remember, as long as it is on the same phone, and it will affect your RED account search results and preferences afterwards.
RED remembers your WIFI details and mobile data usage
Creating an Account:
Define your brand personality
Take note of your target audience, content preposition, content topic classification, and selections before setting up a RED account.
Display Picture
Upload a real-life photo that resonates with the tagline of RED; "Mark my life".
Set an identical username with your other social media accounts
If you want to redirect your audience to other platforms, we recommend using the same name across all the media platforms that you would like to increase traffic
RED ID
Set the same ID as your WeChat account for communication with your followers on both channels afterwards
Include Personalised Signature
A creative name could state your identity on RED and let followers remember your account easily
Starting to Run Your Account:
Position yourself as an average user at the primary stage instead of commercialising your contents, because the algorithm does not support unauthorised commercial accounts
Perform everyday user habits on specific timeframes
Liking, commenting and saving the posts close to your niche to the collection at 8-10 am,12-2 pm, 6-8 pm,9-11 pm, to allow the RED algorithm to create your account positioning based on your reading habits.
RED Primary Account Management Strategy
In conclusion, here are a few key-takeaways for growing your RED account as a beginner
Define and stick to your account niche to create your brand
Be specific in your content preferences and the niche of your account will help to position your account and promote contents within the RED algorithm
Begin growing your account with quality posts
The newly registered RED users would receive higher possibility in their content promotion. Therefore, new users are recommended to share a few high-quality posts to start with and attract more followers at the beginning with the starter-promotion effect
Reduce commercialized contents
New users are recommended to focus on sharing their daily life updates, real-life experience and knowledge with original quality contents instead of commercial advertising contents, because RED would only promote accounts with organic contents.
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