The little red book, once trapped in community content and commercialization, is going out of the state of "pinching".
Source: pixabay In the e-commerce competition, the giants are waiting around, and Little Red Book has fired the first shot of Big Push.
Recently, Little Red Book officially launched 618. Zhang Xiaohui, the head anchor, was the first to ignite the promotion atmosphere. The number of viewers in the live broadcast room exceeded one million, and the sales exceeded 100 million yuan. The live broadcast pictures of a crowd of stores and mid waist anchors also preempted the information flow of the platform recommendation page.
On May 20, Little Red Book released an official war report. On the first day of live broadcast, the number of orders was 8.2 times that of the same period last year, the number of GMV transactions on the first day of live broadcast was 6 times that of the same period last year, the number of registered goods was 2.8 times that of the same period last year, and the number of users who bought live broadcast rooms was 7.4 times that of the same period last year.
During 618 this year, Xiaohongshu did not set up pre-sales, and the merchant side clearly took out more traffic to encourage live broadcast, especially the development of shop broadcast.
A number of users reported to Time Finance that since last year, the home page of Little Red Book has been frequently flashed to the live broadcast page, and many store broadcast accounts of clothing brands and daily necessities have also opened all-weather live broadcast.
After a combination of boxing, the context of commercialization gradually became clear, and Xiaohongshu temporarily got rid of the embarrassing period of profit. According to the Financial Times, in 2023, Little Red Book will achieve a revenue of US $3.7 billion and a net profit of US $500 million, turning losses into profits compared with a loss of US $200 million in 2022.
In addition, Little Red Book is also committed to breaking the circle at the public level. In the first half of this year, Xiaohongshu cooperated with the Spring Festival Gala to launch the accompanying live broadcast of Everyone's Spring Festival Gala, showing the e-commerce shopping scene of shopping while shopping.
The little red book, once trapped in community content and commercialization, is going out of the state of "pinching". However, can Xiaohongshu still hold the window period of traffic when the old brand e-commerce companies adopt the strategy of low price and user experience?
Wasted flow gold mine
Wang Ping's starting point was a small red book note. She showed her handmade dolls, which attracted a group of toy collectors unexpectedly, and the number of fans quickly rose to thousands. Since then, Xiaohongshu has become the first position for her product promotion. Customized products with an average price of 300 yuan can steadily sell tens of thousands of yuan of sales every month.
"Handmade dolls are a small and beautiful track, which can easily be swallowed up by other platforms, but you can quickly find interested circles on the Little Red Book, and the process of publishing notes can gradually screen a group of core fans." Wang Ping said that, in her opinion, although the number of orders for this part is small, it is enough to run a small business.
However, Wang Ping's first loyal customers still went to WeChat. Jewelry entrepreneur Dan Dan also has similar experience. At the beginning of last year, her little red book store was officially opened, and the live broadcast, short video product introduction, and daily transactions just had a preliminary model in the station.
In fact, in the golden period of the development of live broadcast e-commerce, the little red book with grass planting and shelf e-commerce prototype has become an outsider in the air, watching other content platforms quickly complete the business closed-loop from grass planting to order placement.
The dithering topic anchors appear frequently, constantly breaking the e-commerce sales record of the platform; The fast hand also gradually got rid of the constraints of the head family, and the mid waist anchor began to show his skills. In contrast, Xiaohongshu is still in the awkward situation of "planting grass in the station and placing orders outside the station", which is called "10 years of professional traffic bridal clothing" in the industry.
According to the business dynamic data of Little Red Book, the number of monthly active users of Little Red Book has reached 106 million, of which the proportion of men and women has reached 3:7, 50% after 1995, 35% after 2000, and 50% in the first and second tier cities.
"Compared with other platforms such as Taobao and Pinduoduo, the core user group of Xiaohongshu is not very sensitive to price, and they pursue the uniqueness of the product. If the product that excites their interest is launched, it can quickly facilitate the conversion of orders, and the top buyers of the platform can also provide aesthetic attitude and emotional value to these users." An e-commerce operator told Time Finance, In her opinion, once the demand of consumers of Little Red Book is developed, the take-off of commercialization is also expected.
In August 2023, the indecisive Little Red Book finally made a further commercial choice.
First of all, Xiaohongshu has integrated e-commerce business and live broadcast business, and established a new trading department, which is parallel to the Community Department and the Commerce Department as a first-class department. Previously, e-commerce business was a secondary department under the Community Department, with Xiao Hongshu COO Conan as the head of the new department.
Later, Xiaohongshu successively closed the self operated e-commerce project "Little Oasis" and the self operated cross-border e-commerce platform "Welfare Club", focusing on building a "buyer e-commerce" model and developing the live broadcast with goods model.
Not yet in the safe area
In February last year, Dong Jie achieved a live broadcast sales of 90 million yuan, and became the first sister of the platform. Zhang Xiaohui, the same content creator, also accelerated her entrance, creating a single live broadcast record of more than 100 million yuan, opening up the imagination of Xiaohongshu's e-commerce live broadcast.
People close to Little Red Book told the media that Dong Jie's "out of the circle" was unexpected by the team and the platform.
Then, a group of brands and businesses came in. From March to May last year, the number of e-commerce brand businesses settling in Little Red Book was twice that of the same period last year, and the monthly transaction volume of live broadcast had tripled compared with the beginning of the year.
This trend has also enabled Little Red Book to have a place in e-commerce promotion.
"Since the middle of May, stores have intensively arranged live broadcasts, with an average of three per day, creating momentum for 618." Lili, who is in charge of a brand's e-commerce channel, said to Time Finance. However, in the case of more competition from other platforms, Lili admitted that the new user scale of Little Red Book was not as smooth as expected, and the first day sales did not surprise the team too much.
The brand operated by Lili was one of the first merchants attracted by Little Red Book. As she recalled, at the beginning, the traffic tilt policy provided by the platform was very generous. In the first month, hundreds of thousands of audience data entered the market, and with the data of "Da Ren" live broadcast, the sales in one month could reach millions of yuan.
In addition to attracting merchants, the commercialization team inside Little Red Book ushered in a rapid change of senior management.
In January this year, Wu Yingbing, the former head of Didi's supply and demand strategy, joined Little Red Book. He was previously responsible for some of Didi's e-commerce businesses; In March, market news said that Ye Heng, the former e-commerce product leader of Fasthand, resigned and joined Little Red Book; In April, Zhao Weichen, the former director secretary and general manager of Enterprise Development and Investor Relations Department of Card Transfer Technology, was reported to have joined Little Red Book as the head of commercialization of the Internet industry.
"The company's commercialized team is the most voluminous, with great performance pressure. Overtime is a common occurrence. Last year, the team turnover was very high." A small red book employee told Times Finance.
However, the reform of Xiaohongshu has not yet been reflected in the user purchase experience. Li Fang stays in Xiaohongshu APP for the longest time every day, but she has not yet been transformed into a loyal consumer of the platform. "The platform's customer service response, logistics service, after-sales and other infrastructure needs to be improved, so that the overall shopping experience will be greatly reduced."
A member of the marketing department of a consumer brand told Time Finance that many brands in the leading brand industry still regard Little Red Book as the full matrix promotion position of KOL. In addition, whether it is new product promotion or subsequent sales channels, Little Red Book should be ranked after Tmall and Tiao Yin.
The buyer e-commerce model that the platform is proud of has not yet formed a mature ecology, and the live broadcast frequency and total live broadcast data are difficult to compare with other head anchors. with For example, Zhang Xiaohui, the head buyer, had 1.47 million fans on her Xiaohongshu account at the end of October last year, but so far, the number of fans has only 1.86 million, and the number of fans has increased less than 400000 in seven months. For an e-commerce anchor in the rising stage, the rate of fan growth is far from the industry average.
It is worth mentioning that on the very day when Tmall officially launched 618 promotion, the fate of the head buyers of Little Red Book also changed. According to multiple media reports, Teresa Coming soon Taobao Live. If the advantages of exclusive anchors are difficult to maintain, The commercialization process of Little Red Book will be more tortuous.
(All interviewees in this article are pseudonyms.)
