Little Red Book's ground promotion, targeting the elderly.
Text | Zhong Yixuan
Editor | Qiao Qian
Today, if you are in a Beijing vegetable market and have a chance to get 6 free eggs, the most unexpected possibility might be to download Xiaohongshu.
Since May 2024, this APP with over 100 million daily active users and over 300 million monthly active users is quietly launching a large-scale offline promotion. Similar to all past offline promotions, the core weapons are still eggs, steamed buns, and laundry detergent, and Xiaohongshu is no exception.
Offline promotion itself is not rare. As an early method of attracting new users in the Chinese Internet, from shared bikes, community grocery shopping to the short-video talent recruitment battle initiated by Douyin and Kuaishou, the role of the human-wave tactics has been repeatedly and successfully verified. It has always been the most primitive, direct, and effective solution.
However, when it comes to Xiaohongshu, there is inevitably a sense of collision between eggs and steamed buns and the sophisticated influencers. After all, founders Mao Wenchao and Qu Fang initially used only 7 PDFs to form the prototype of Xiaohongshu. These 7 shopping guides for popular travel destinations almost determined the temperament of Xiaohongshu that has continued to this day - a sophisticated and practical community, and it has gathered a group of urban users who yearn for a better quality of life, pursue style and humanistic spirit.
After publicly stating in 2025 that it wants to achieve a closed loop in commercialization and e-commerce, in addition to presenting more convenient tools and stimulating more merchants to settle in, Xiaohongshu's potential naturally lies in more people outside the existing traffic pool. Xiaohongshu once stated that its goal is to have 300 million daily active users. Now, it has also returned to the two most fundamental purposes of all community-based apps: attracting new users and retaining existing users.
Xiaohongshu offers eggs for attracting new users. Image source: Internet
High Price, Fission, and Penetration
Service provider Wang Qiang used three words to summarize the characteristics of Xiaohongshu's offline promotion this time - high price, fission, and penetration.
The price of offline promotion is determined by demand. Wang Qiang said that in the most intense era of the battle between Douyin and Kuaishou, even the lowest-level offline promotion left traces of burning money. At that time, for successfully attracting a new user to Douyin Speed Version, the offline promoter could get a high price of up to 45 yuan. Because of their generosity, Douyin and Kuaishou were once called "the most conscientious companies" in the offline promotion industry.
This is not just an individual opinion. Another service provider said that although the fierce competition between these two is in the past, and the price of offline promotion has been repeatedly reduced due to the saturation of traffic, until the first half of 2024, a new user of Douyin Speed Version could still be worth up to 20 yuan. "Even today, Douyin will still drop some demands from time to time according to business changes." To some extent, although Internet products have been iterated for a long time, offline promotion has never disappeared. Wang Qiang told 36Kr that until today, Soul and Momo are still doing offline promotion, but the price is not high, "only a few yuan", and they are not competitive among many platforms.
But in today's range, the narrative of burning money to attract new users has long passed. Xiaohongshu has come from behind and instead provides the most competitive price among all Internet companies.
According to Wang Qiang, the current offline promotion price for successfully attracting a new Xiaohongshu user, according to the three levels of promoter, partner, and senior partner, can get a return of up to 34 to 38 yuan.
The core of these returns lies in the assessment of the second-day retention (retention on the second day after download) and the seventh-day retention (retention on the seventh day after download). If only the new user is attracted on the day of promotion, only about 10 yuan can be settled. An interesting observation is that in the composition of the offline promotion price, it can also be seen that the attitude of Internet companies towards attracting new users has changed - compared with the efficiency-first approach in the early stage of competing for users, after the traffic has peaked, companies are obviously more concerned about the user's duration of stay rather than the growth number.
Since there is no such thing as a free lunch, the offline promotion team naturally shifted. Since the second half of 2024, Wang Qiang's team has quickly shifted from Douyin and Kuaishou to Xiaohongshu's offline promotion business. "Our team of 120 people, with an average of 30 orders per person per day, is now focused only on Xiaohongshu."
Another characteristic is fission. Xiaohongshu has chosen the offline promotion promotion system, that is, to allow the aforementioned different levels of offline promoters to receive incentives for attracting new users from their direct subordinates, which is also what Kuaishou once did. "This hierarchical fission will mean a greater investment, and the effect is also faster," said an industry insider. The effect is immediate. Wang Qiang told 36Kr that the competition among Xiaohongshu service providers is already very fierce, and they are all expanding the team size at the fastest speed, waiting for an outbreak during the Spring Festival when there is a large flow of people.
Having been established for more than ten years, "youthfulness" and "usefulness" have seemingly been engraved in the company's temperament of Xiaohongshu. Xiaohongshu's current 300 million monthly active users have a gender ratio of 3:7, with 50% of them being post-95s and 50% being users from first- and second-tier cities, and the daily average user search rate reaches 60%. Therefore, Wang Qiang's offline promotion strategy naturally goes against the trend. Male users, middle-aged and especially elderly groups are the key groups they are targeting for attracting new users on Xiaohongshu.
China now has nearly 1.1 billion Internet users, and the Internet penetration rate is close to 80%, but there are still large differences in the differentiation of people and regions. Wang Qiang has been engaged in the offline promotion industry for many years. According to his observation, "In fact, for people over 40 years old, regardless of gender, only a few really use Xiaohongshu" - this seems to confirm a reality that in the Internet world, different groups of people are firmly wrapped in their own cocoons - just like how an urban white-collar worker can hardly imagine that there are people around who have never heard of Xiaohongshu.
Since the second half of 2024, Xiaohongshu's growth in attracting new users has been significant. According to Aurora Mobile, as of November 2024, Xiaohongshu's monthly active users have reached 330 million, with significant growth in October and November. The number of monthly active users increased by 56 million and 63 million respectively, doubling the average value of about 30 million in other months of 2024.
As for how long this offline promotion to attract new users will last, contrary to some reports that it will last for 4 years, according to past experience, Wang Qiang's judgment is 2 years. "Over the years, the life cycle of an offline promotion project of an APP, from the beginning to the end, is basically two years," he said.
The Proposition of "Retention"
Xiaohongshu's most recent large-scale marketing campaign to attract new users can be traced back to the Spring Festival Gala project in 2024. As the most popular festival gala in the country, the Spring Festival Gala has always been a must-win battlefield for top Internet companies. The famous WeChat Red Packet "Surprise Attack on Pearl Harbor" incident took place at the Spring Festival Gala.
It can be seen that under the background that the monthly active users exceeded 300 million in 2023 and the growth rate of the user scale has slowed down or even stagnated, Xiaohongshu has actually been covering all age groups and all levels of cities for a long time. The Spring Festival Gala and offline promotion are just the distinction between online and offline.
However, beyond breaking the circle, retaining users is the most enduring proposition for every Internet company. Otherwise, over the years, big companies would not have been competing fiercely for daily active users and monthly active users.
To attract more users and keep them using continuously, Xiaohongshu has been making adjustments from the product form to the content supply. One example is that from horizontal screen to vertical screen, Xiaohongshu's video interface is becoming more and more like Douyin and Kuaishou, and there are more and more video content recommendations on the community homepage. In 2024, the number of video-preference creators is 1.48 times that of the same period last year. All these are Xiaohongshu's efforts to increase the weight of video. Although it started with graphics and text, Xiaohongshu also has to admit that the natural fast pace of short videos gives it the viral communication characteristics that graphics and text do not have, which is also inevitable for Xiaohongshu to please the sinking market users.
As for the community content supply, it is no secret that Xiaohongshu has added pan-entertainment vertical content such as games and digital products to expand the male user base. However, a person close to Xiaohongshu said, "There are effects, but most of the men who stay are those who get along well with women in the first place." Judging from the results, what Xiaohongshu attracts are more game contents where female users gather, such as otome games.
Perhaps in the short term, the elderly group is the most likely to achieve a breakthrough in retention. On January 6, the latest data disclosed by Xiaohongshu showed that as of the end of 2024, the number of monthly active elderly users over 60 years old has exceeded 30 million, and the number of elderly creators has increased threefold in the past two years, with a cumulative total of more than 100 million notes published. At this point, it is traceable that service providers are targeting the elderly group for attracting new users.
According to Mob Research Institute data, the top five content preferences of short-video types for the silver-haired group in China are news hotspots, history and culture, military, health and wellness, and positive energy. At this point, WeChat Video Account can be said to have taken full advantage of this - the elderly science popularization videos that flood family group chats are typical examples.
In fact, Xiaohongshu has also been studying the preferences of the elderly group, but it is relatively low-key. The aforementioned person told 36Kr, "Xiaohongshu actually has an 'Old Xiaohongshu' project team that has been doing the business related to treasure appraisal for a long time, even earlier than before Qingquan Treasure Appraisal became popular, but it didn't catch on."
The needs of the elderly group cannot be underestimated. The popularity of "Xiucai" and "A Smile that Captivates the City" on Douyin has once shaped the fragmented traffic landscape of the Internet. Just a pursed-lip and lip-smearing smile from Xiucai can attract millions of likes. However, even if the preferences are known, what kind of content the elderly will create on Xiaohongshu also needs to be in line with the current community tone of Xiaohongshu. Observations show that the elderly accounts with few fans but high likes (meaning they are recommended by the platform) are mostly long graphics and text that share daily life and life experience.
It is not difficult to imagine that after the large-scale offline promotion, Xiaohongshu will definitely try to keep the new users. However, one thing is certain that the method of retention will no longer be the extensive and rough way that short-video platforms used to sprinkle hundreds of millions of red envelopes on the Spring Festival Gala. The era of "great efforts lead to miracles" has passed. After all, every penny spent now and every new user attracted must be recovered in commercialization.
(Wang Qiang in the article is a pseudonym)