The Little Red Book of Being Shaken

Apps are becoming more and more alike, and the most recent time I experienced this was on Little Red Book. When I opened Xiaohongshu, the system recommended me a video of Wang Zulan and a painting grandmother, which felt like opening another Shake Shack.

Roughly brush down, "jittery" content quite a lot, while the proportion of traditional beauty personal care plate content is not as much as expected, if not prompted, you may not be too easy to realize that this is a women's beauty content based on the grass community.

Initially, I thought this might be a case of illusion caused by the recommendation algorithm, but after searching, I found that the feeling of "Little Red Book Jitterbug" is by no means an isolated case. In addition, from the Baidu keyword association, the small red book has a certain content crisis.

Short videos make the little red book jitterbug

We believe that for content communities, the most core competitiveness is the ability to produce and consume original content. The success of Xiaohongshu lies in the large number of users who can coalesce to produce exclusive weed notes on the platform, but under the wave of videoization, Xiaohongshu seems to be somewhat lost.

Most of the short video content on Xiaohongshu is not exclusive, but migrated from mature short video platforms such as Jinyin Express, which has somewhat impacted the content creativity of the community itself and blurred the community tone.

The videoization of Xiaohongshu can undoubtedly improve the various operational data, but the network also has some users reflect: most of the video content recommended on Xiaohongshu users have already seen in Shake/fast hands, and there is not much unique, and there is no need to watch it again in Xiaohongshu.

However, if we compare the B station, we can find the point of difference. Ghost animal and secondary yuan content can almost only be watched and consumed in the B station, but the popular short video content, we can almost see in all mainstream short video APP.

The essence of short video is "short", because of the physical limitations on the length of time, so that the explosion of short video content sets simple and crude, through high-frequency strong stimulation so that users can not stop, to achieve the state of the heart flow. But it is also for this reason, short video in the content of the scalability is not strong, it is difficult to match the vertical field of content consumption needs, it is difficult to expand the depth and breadth of the content, after all, in more than a dozen seconds, there are not many things that can be said clearly.

Therefore, we can find that all the products that try to short video, in short video content are similar, and there is no graphic content area to distinguish so obvious. Even the UI interface of short video products will continue to converge, just like the touch screen has become a big trend, all cell phones look similar.

In my personal cell phone, Wang Zulan (the video is often recommended, although I don't really want to see him), whether in Shake, fast hand, or Xiaohongshu, posted the same short video content, typical of one draft, and will not create different short videos according to the characteristics of different platforms, not at all as heartfelt as Fan Bingbing when he writes planting notes on Xiaohongshu. But the reason behind it is likely to be that the carrier of the short video itself, can not bear the burden of verticalized content.

We are not very optimistic about this phenomenon, short video dividend has peaked, from the side of the feedback, many users have produced aesthetic fatigue, jittery and fast hand content differences are not too big today, short video platform if you want to further develop, will be slowly penetrate into the field of long video. And for the small red book, Zhihu and other vertical communities, if you support the short video content area, also need to find their own unique point to do.

The dilemma before Little Red Book

For Xiaohongshu, now has the shape and potential of a full-category community, many non-female-oriented long-tail products have good exposure data and grass-planting potential.

Around a friend commented that Xiaohongshu "can not be out of the explosive, but everything", Xiaohongshu's explosive is often confined to the Xiaohongshu platform, the influence of the topic in the whole network is not great, but rare is that many niche products, non-female oriented products in the Xiaohongshu have a good exposure and discussion, such as drones, mechanical keyboards and so on.

And behind today's Little Red Book Jitterbugization, it reflects the unsolvable problem in the expansion of vertical content platforms - the watering down of community content. The influx of mass users will dilute the community tone, leading to the escape of hard-core users, so that the entire community atmosphere in the direction of entertainment, if the content operation is weak, the entire community is prone to become segmented. At present, "content chaos", "quality is not as good as before" has become the common feeling of many old users.

And this year is the commercialization of small red book opened a year, from raising the standard of KOL cooperation, test water live all kinds of action, the official attitude is relatively conservative and cautious, but also triggered a lot of discussion and controversy in the industry.

Overall, Xiaohongshu seems to be facing two important nodes at the same time: 1, the massification of vertical communities (from vertical categories to all categories), and 2, the commercialization of the platform. However, we believe that it is not difficult to do these two points at the same time.

Vertical community of broken circle expansion itself needs to give KOLs a certain incentive space, which is often reflected in the KOLs traffic cash dividends, otherwise KOLs will lose the creative power.

However, in today's small red book mall does not have the advantage of the situation, the commercialization of the platform is contrary to the interests of the KOLs, the need to extract the proportion of advertising revenue from KOLs in order to obtain the commercialization of income, which exists in the cake of the distribution of benefits, how to balance the original is a difficult problem.

Another unique embarrassment in front of the Xiaohongshu platform is that, as a content planting community, content and commercial information are inextricably linked, and we can even consider every planting note a native advertisement. Therefore, the platform's judgment standard for commercial information will appear very vague and subjective, which is difficult to convince KOLs, resulting in KOLs always having a tendency to run away.

In any case, with the expansion of the platform and commercialization, this year may be the year of the biggest changes in the small red book, but there is no doubt that some people will leave because of this, and some people will love it more.