way of life
Big bang
In Fight Club, which was released in 1999, the protagonist Jack sat on the toilet with an IKEA catalogue and ordered a dust-proof quilt cover with a phone in his ear. Reading home magazines is the way to seek excitement in his repeated life.
Today’s little red book is also like an online life magazine, but it sells a fresh lifestyle.
What do you think of Little Red Book? Different users may have different answers, such as hardcover model room life, advertising posters with full filters, universal encyclopedia of life and search engines. ……
Little Red Books always seem to make a certain concept or phenomenon explode and package it into a "yearning life".
From online celebrity Sports Pusher to Life Trend "KOL"
The heat of City Walk occupied the whole summer, and it coincided with the National Day trip, and various raiders broke ground. Some people think that this is pretending to be a foreign word. In fact, it is not bad for Xiaohongshu. The backpacker was in City Walk ten years ago.
The contribution of Little Red Book is to keep the shell of the word, but expand its meaning. "2023 Little Red Book City Walk Trend Report" defines City Walk as "all walks around looking for happiness".
Image from: Little Red Book @ Polar Camera, @ Yuan Ye loves to travel.
In this way, City Walk actually has no deeper connotation than a street runner. On the other hand, packaging the walk as a City Walk will make it sound better, at least let more people go out, and it is good to be close to nature, which is healthier than sitting at home for a long time.
Taking advantage of the heat, Xiaohongshu also created an 11-day "Road Life Festival" in August, and moved "Life" to 37 roads in Shanghai, landing more than 200 activities, eating, reading poetry, listening to music, sharing pet stories and shooting street images. ……
We cross the street every day, eat, drink and sleep every day, but the little red book can package a "road life festival".
Is it a bit artificial? Yes Some people say that City Walk is a downgrade of consumption, and it has to self-package, flaunting exquisiteness and fashion. That’s right. Looking back at the sports that Little Red Book has been on fire, in fact, they all have similar temperament to City Walk.
Around 2021, outdoor activities such as camping, land rushing and frisbee began to catch fire in Xiaohongshu. Compared with basketball and football, their popularity is naturally not dominant, but to some extent, they are all types that lower the threshold of practice and provide emotional value more easily.
Without practice, there is no right to speak. Take the two sports I have experienced for example.
Image from: Little Red Book @ Heart solo Club
Land surfboard is a kind of skateboard in a broad sense. During the one-hour skateboarding introductory class experience, the coach let us play longboard first, and after learning the basic movements such as boarding, pressing waves, accelerating and stopping the board, we can try Lu Chong if we have spare capacity. Lu Chong’s board is taller and shorter than the longboard, but he can pull a few times after learning the longboard.
The coach takes part-time photography after teaching, and many students are attracted by the photo service called "cool circle of friends". In the club science popularization I interviewed, every stage of Lu Chong had different fun. Novices mastered the foundation of flat land, and experts challenged all kinds of terrain. They also held an exhibition game of Lu Chong in the bowl pool.
Paddle board is a kind of water sport, and several actions in pre-class teaching are very simple, including how to hold the paddle, and how to speed up, slow down and turn by paddling, and make sure that you can get into the water after wearing a life jacket.
The drone shooting results of paddle board.
If, like me, I don’t pursue high, just sit and row in a proper way and don’t stand up at the risk of falling into the water, then the paddle is just a mechanical physical activity. What is more important may be the scenery on the river bank, the chatting partners, the onlookers and the drones that follow the head, but don’t forget to go back and do muscle stretching.
To sum up simply and rudely, these sports still have a certain threshold and amount of exercise, and the upper limit can be not low, and it is interesting to experience. Dopamine obtained by exercise is not deceptive and useless, but the sense of accomplishment that makes you feel happy is not deceptive.
However, it is undeniable that they put more emphasis on novice friendliness, and photography, communication and social interaction are also indispensable, thus becoming one "online celebrity Movement" with complete elements.
Although online celebrity is becoming a derogatory term, it also objectively describes the influence of something on the Internet, and online life is always entangled with offline life.
In other words, the academic description is what Peng Lan, the author of Introduction to Network Communication, said. Little Red Books promoted "media consumption".
Users find a destination or an activity in Xiaohongshu, go offline to experience it, and then go back to Xiaohongshu to punch in, and so on. It is not only the basis for making decisions, but also the stage for self-presentation.
The small red book operation team is naturally behind the scenes. Since 2021, Xiaohongshu began to promote camping, land rushing, frisbee and other contents. At that time, these sports were more niche, but Xiaohongshu hoped that through them, users could see that they were different from Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker.
In fact, in normal times, the official accounts in various vertical fields of Xiaohongshu are also highly active, including "Fashion Potato", "Eating Potato" and "Home Potato". Participating in their regular tasks can get traffic support and activity rewards from the platform.
When the platform has accumulated rich and tonal content, Little Red Book gradually appeared as a "KOL" (key opinion leader). Since 2020, a life trend report has been released at the end of each year, and the forecast for 2023 is "into real life". At the end of September this year, there is also a forecast for the National Day tourism trend.
Xiaohongshu also found the "connection point" between offline and offline. As long as offline life is changing, whether camping or cycling, people will flood in to post, and some will temporarily throw away their mobile phones and do the same. In the future, it will not be surprising that there will be more online celebrity movements here.
Useful experience, with beautification of life.
For City Walk, what you found in Little Red Book is not only the route recommendation, but also the wearing guide and film tutorial, which are simply "life experiences".
In the past two years, Little Red Book has increasingly become a platform to provide life experience, and even been used to replace search engines such as Baidu.
There is a key node, the home year of 2020. In February of that year, the food content of Xiaohongshu actually surpassed the beauty as a "pillar" and was promoted to the first vertical category. How to cook a dish well has become one of the most concerned issues.
Now, Little Red Book has been recognized as an encyclopedia of life. Many foreign students are also heavy users of Little Red Book. They exchange internship experience, pay attention to the latest exhibition information and study Chinese restaurants nearby.
These posts are most in line with the values that Xiaohongshu strives to create: it is possible for ordinary people to help ordinary people.
Of course, on a big platform where you live more than 260 million a month, even the life experience of "facing the sky" is exaggerated. In the little red book whose content is diverse enough, I will also brush the frowning content.
I don’t know what to read and how to read. Xiaohongshu has a large number of reading bloggers, among which there are many flow-oriented assembly line bloggers. For them, the title and cover are especially important.
Instead of writing "Good Books to Share" dryly, the title should point out what you can gain from reading this book, such as "I suddenly stopped being impetuous after reading this book". Needless to say, the cover should create a beautiful and lively atmosphere.
The above is just as an example to illustrate the two sets of methodologies for the growing small red book community: usefulness and aesthetics. They make up the little red book, and each light life experience is shared.
"Useful" is not an encyclopedic major, but enough to teach you life experience by hand; "Aesthetics" is not a unique flower in the mountains, but has elements that can be copied. For example, the hottest template in the first half of 2022 was "iPhone memo copy".
However, there are also useless and unattractive beauty. Some bloggers don’t change the routine of content, cover and title, which makes people suffer from intensive phobia.
When I brush the little red book with high intensity and deliberately choose the content related to lifestyle, the information flow can probably be divided into two categories:
One is how to make individuals better. Aesthetic accumulation, starting from the media, knowing a brand every day, being clumsy must brush these variety shows wildly, life advice not to spend in advance, minimalism is another trap of consumerism, and idol’s photos are of great reference significance to ordinary people. ……
The other is how to make life more interesting. Visit the treasure market, take a rest day in brunch, a day in Shanghai City Walk, go to an acquaintance’s birthday party to dance Swing, take photos in Guangzhou Shamian, and ride in the city of Brompton. ……
Most of the content has one thing in common, the information density is not high, and there is a small angle between it and daily life, which can be touched on tiptoe. Some are useful and can be followed; Some of them are as beautiful as shop windows, which can convey some emotional value of "dignity".
Compared with Zhihu’s knowledge surplus, Little Red Book is actually a surplus of life experience. There are always people who stepped on the pit before you, realized their dreams, punched in online celebrity, discovered life tips, and then shared them in a sincere or exaggerated way.
Life experience is a broad vocabulary, which is not exhaustive, varies from person to person, has no standard answer, and even is difficult to distinguish between true and false. Therefore, it is inevitable, both sincere altruism and understandable posturing.
Ai Faner once interviewed Jimu, a heavy user of Xiaohongshu. After 2019, she frequently used Xiaohongshu search. When she encountered something curious or uncertain in her life, she would try it on it, but she also had the experience of being pitted, so she summed up the experience:
Xiaohongshu is much softer and wider, and you still have to judge more about beauty, food shops and travel guides.
Selective use and critical adoption are the personal survival philosophy of using social media in contemporary times.
From selling goods to selling lifestyles.
Compared with personal usage habits, what can determine the temperament of a platform more may be what it chooses to enlarge.
In 2020, Xiaohongshu’s monthly life exceeded 100 million, but it was also in this year’s user survey that Xiaohongshu realized the bad influence of "false planting grass", and users thought the content was vain and exaggerated. In April, 2021, Xiaohongshu published the Community Convention, which clearly put forward the community behavior norms of "sincere sharing and friendly interaction".
Convention is an optional appeal, so Xiaohongshu also made an article in the algorithm system, adding a core indicator CES (User Participation Score), which is related to the number of likes, collections, comments, attention, etc. These indicators all reflect the interaction between a post and users.
In many cases, the interaction can reflect the quality of a post and the usefulness of the information. Making better posts easier to be seen by more people also promotes "sincere sharing and friendly interaction" at the algorithmic level.
At the same time, the relative decentralization of the little red book algorithm has also cultivated the habit of sharing individual experiences among massive users.
70%-80% of the traffic of Little Red Book goes to Discovery Page. If the quality is high, a note may also get a high amount of interaction for the "small transparency" of double-digit fans. When the visibility of ordinary people is higher, their desire to share is enhanced.
In January, 2022, Haoran Liu and Gu Ailing starred in an advertisement, which pointed out that "200 million people’s life experiences are all in Little Red Book" and explicitly regarded "usefulness" as the community culture of Little Red Book.
In fact, Little Red Book is not born as a distribution center of life experience and an encyclopedia suitable for searching. About what little red book is, little red book itself may have been confused for some time, because its definition has been changing.
Founded in 2013, Xiaohongshu started as an outbound shopping guide. Originally, it was just a platform for Haitao Raiders, and its positioning was "finding good things overseas". Later, it frequently changed its slogan from "good things all over the world" to "good life all over the world" and then to "marking my life".
Accompanied by it, the content types of Little Red Book are also expanding. At first, it mainly focused on Haitao sharing, wearing beauty cosmetics and traveling overseas. Later, its tentacles extended to beauty cosmetics, home, maternal and child, food, fashion and digital home appliances, and all areas of life were wiped out.
It is also in this change that Xiaohongshu has given himself more freedom to advance and retreat. It is not only planting good products such as grass lipstick, but also recommending a good lifestyle.
From selling goods to selling lifestyles, Xiaohongshu put himself in a very clever position.
There is no broader word than lifestyle. Outdoor activities such as camping, frisbee and City Walk, and fashionable clothes such as dopamine, old money style and Maillard can all be lifestyles. They may be fleeting as trends, but new trends will emerge.
More content categories can be broadened, and more traffic may sweep in. More importantly, with a certain lifestyle, you can recommend the goods, services and brands behind you, just one step away from consumption.
In other words, the little red book has always been closely associated with consumption. From the initial Haitao shopping, to the beauty community, and then to the life guide with extensive content, it should be the most taboo "buy in buy buy" among major social applications. Xiaohongshu’s "product planting grass" from this year is actually to make the route from planting grass to consumption more scientific.
Different from other platforms, Little Red Book users like to ask for links in the comment area.
At the same time, lifestyle means massive life sharing and subjective experience. This is a field where there is no standard answer, nor is it a field where professional bloggers have the final say, but a community moat that has formed barriers with a large number of users for a long time.
In Xiaohongshu, everything related to lifestyle is promoted by algorithms and conventions, encouraging more ordinary people to share and help each other, maximizing the number and types of experiences, and expecting to awaken and solve more long-tailed and diverse consumer needs.
In August this year, Little Red Book celebrated its 10th anniversary. Saint seiya, CEO of Little Red Book, mentioned in his speech that he hoped that in the future, when people opened Little Red Book, they could both see a "vast world" and feel a "warm small community".
A large part of the criticism of the little red book is that it is pretentious. The same is true when criticizing the "new middle class" around 2017. What is the new middle class? Then it is not middle class, but at most it is prepared middle class and marginal middle class, with consumer psychology and cultural literacy, but the economic level has not kept up.
The fact is, in a person’s life, there won’t be much good enough to talk about, or even a 10-minute vlog. Little Red Book does the opposite, and lives hard, or at least tries to perform life.
A platform with a monthly activity of more than 200 million must have many sides. If the platform chooses to enlarge a certain side, users can also choose which side to see.
In fact, I prefer to actively search for a question in the search box of Xiaohongshu rather than brushing the recommendation page. I prefer to browse topics such as old things renovation, free new exhibitions, and workplace methodology rather than open a picture with a delicate cover.
Because I prefer to skip all kinds of temptation to buy, and regard the little red book as a social observation record to understand other people’s lives and emerging lifestyles. In this way, the little red book is indeed my lifestyle dictionary.