As a social media platform that caters to a young and trendy audience, Xiaohongshu, also known as Little Red Book, has become a key battleground for e-commerce channels and wine brands eager to reach its 300 million monthly active users.
The surge in popularity follows the introduction of e-commerce features, allowing wine sales to flourish on the platform. However, Xiaohongshu’s non-commercial ethos means that successful promotion or sales through content can be challenging.
What is Xiaohongshu?
Xiaohongshu stands out among Chinese social media platforms, including TikTok’s Chinese version, Douyin, by offering a blend of image and text posts, short videos, live streaming, and direct sales. The platform tailors content recommendations based on user preferences, which allows for an effortless discovery of relevant posts as users scroll. This personalized approach was recently augmented by the addition of sales features, enabling merchants to open stores and conduct live streaming.
According to Caixin, a Chinese financial news outlet, Xiaohongshu achieved an average of 100 million daily active users in 2023, and by February this year its monthly active users has hit 300 million. Although modest compared to Douyin’s 750 million daily users, Xiaohongshu’s niche is its fashionable, youthful demographic, particularly women. At the China Food and Drinks Fair in Chengdu, Xiaohongshu team revealed that half of Xiaohongshu’s monthly users come from first and second-tier cities, and 70% of its users are born in 1990s, indicating a wealthier, predominantly female and Gen-Z user base with significant spending power.
According to data from internet business intelligence service QuestMobile, about 17% of Xiaohongshu users spend at least RMB 3,000 (US$413) online every month on the platform even during economic downturn, the biggest proportion among major Chinese social apps.
The platform has also seen a rise in male users, traditionally the main demographic for alcoholic beverages, who now constitute about 30% of the user base on the platform, most under the age of 35 and concentrated in major cities. More interestingly to wineries and wine brand owners, 66% of Xiaohongshu users regularly consume alcohol and half follow wine-related content, which means that Xiaohongshu has strong sales potential for wine.
It offers a more precise audience. Xiaohongshu is particularly effective for wines that align with current Chinese trends such as bistro bars, natural wines, and mulled wines, all of which are popular on the platform.
Recognizing its massive potential and appeal, wine influencers from Douyin have started to establish a presence on Xiaohongshu, along with many wine brands and merchants, such as Penfolds, Casillero del Diablo, Orin Swift, Vinehoo.com, Wine World, and EMW Fine Wines.
What Kind of Wine Sell on Xiaohongshu?
Xiaohongshu’s appeal lies in its soft marketing and what has come to be known as quiet selling by “planting grass” in contrast to in-your-face selling popularized by douyin.
Users of Xiaohongshu share snippets of life, personal updates and shopping experiences and lifestyle tips. Its main goal is to inspire. On Xiaohongshu, this is called Zhong Cao or “planting grass.” It describes the effect when someone sees something owned by a friend or family member, or an advertisement for a product, and wants it. The effect is like planting a seed in their mind.
A leading Chinese wine KOL and e-commerce expert, Xiao Pi (葡萄酒小皮), said that Xiaohongshu primarily serves to share good products, making it an effective platform for promoting wines. Nowadays, Xiaohongshu has also become a direct shopping platform, thus wines can also be sold directly. There are two ways to sell wine: opening a store or using influencers to drive sales. The underlying logic is no different from other platforms.
“Wo Ai Wo Jiu” (I Love My Wine), which has been studying wine promotion and sales on e-commerce platforms for nearly a decade and now runs three stores in Tianjin and sells online via China’s massive delivery and lifestyle platform Meituan. Its founder Guo Fusheng, shared with Vino Joy News his experiences with Xiaohongshu, saying, “Xiaohongshu is a huge community driven by a fan economy. Merchants first need to generate traffic by planting grass, then lead traffic to private domains, and finally monetize it. An influencer promotes a wine, offers a fan price in the private domain, and completes the sale.”
Xiao Pi himself has nearly 50,000 followers on his personal Xiaohongshu account and also runs a business account under “葡小皮,” with 4,669 followers. According to the KOL and e-commerce expert, he can generate a monthly turnover of RMB 300,000 from Xiaohongshu without doing any livestreaming.
Due to the social media nature of Xiaohongshu and its stylish positioning, the platform’s user behaviors and best-selling product features are quite distinctive. Xiao Pi noted that compared to traditional shelf-based e-commerce platforms like Taobao, JD.com, and Amazon, Xiaohongshu users have higher spending power, a greater propensity for emotional and impulsive purchases, and are predominantly female.
A wine blogger, who has nearly 100,000 followers on Xiaohongshu but prefers to remain anonymous, shared her insights with Vino Joy News: “Compared to Douyin, Xiaohongshu users have stronger purchasing power. Douyin covers a broad audience, and its e-commerce consumers may tend to be on the lower end, while Xiaohongshu, starting with beauty-related planting grass, attracts users who demand quality, resulting in higher purchasing power and average order values on Xiaohongshu than on Douyin.”
The distinctive consumer profiles between Xiaohongshu and Douyin mean that content strategies suitable for one platform may not translate well to the other, added the wine blogger. While both platforms support live streaming for sales, Xiaohongshu’s influencers tend to employ a gentler, more refined marketing tactic known as quiet selling, which resonates more effectively with its unique user base.
In terms of wine choices, Xiao Pi noted that Xiaohongshu users favor quirky, novel wines, such as those with attractive labels, natural wines, special varieties, and wines with unique styles, rather than the traditional brands.
This was confirmed by Xiaohongshu’s wine sales results. The top seven best-selling wines on the platform were all off-dry white wines, featuring colourful packaging and unique bottle shapes, reflecting the purchasing power of Xiaohongshu’s female users.
Challenges
The platform comes with its challenges. Because of its quiet selling, monetization on Xiaohongshu is not immediate.
Zhou Yuan, the China head of the Georgian wine brand Ranina, has tailored their strategy to align with Xiaohongshu’s content-centric nature, prioritizing engagement over direct sales. “Xiaohongshu’s user mindset is still focused on planting grass, which is less commercial than Douyin. Thus, we have always focused on planting grass on Xiaohongshu without trying to sell directly,” he explained.
Xiaohongshu is fundamentally a platform where content reigns supreme, and direct monetization often takes a backseat. Cultivating a purchasing mentality among its users requires patience and strategic content marketing, making promotion rather than immediate sales a more viable strategy for businesses.
Zhou Yuan further noted that Xiaohongshu users are often drawn to accounts with a wide variety of products and regions, and rich content, making it difficult for a single brand to gain traction on the platform.
Indeed, while well-known wine brands like Constellation Brands’ Orin Swift and Chile’s Montes are present on Xiaohongshu, their posts generally receive less than a hundred likes and fewer than ten comments. Similarly, even the diverse wine offerings of Vinehoo.com generally receive only single-digit likes on their Xiaohongshu posts.
Building a popular account on Xiaohongshu is a complex and demanding process. A seasoned wine merchant, experienced in both traditional e-commerce and Xiaohongshu, shed light on the nuances of platform monetization strategies with Vino Joy News.
Highlighting three main avenues of monetization on the platform, he explains: “An insider from Xiaohongshu told me that there are only three effective ways to monetize on the platform: merchants posting notes with product sales links, influencers posting notes with merchants’ product sales links, and merchants hosting their own live streams or hiring influencers to do so. The most effective method is the first one, but building a popular account requires a long accumulation of time, and the unpredictable Xiaohongshu algorithm offers no guaranteed success. The golden rule is always about producing high-quality images and compelling titles.”
The merchant also discussed the pros and cons of using influencers versus growing an independent brand presence. While influencer-led streams can rapidly generate revenue, they often entail substantial costs related to influencer fees and commissions, rendering them less viable for products with slim profit margins.
“Although using influencers for live streams has slightly less monetization potential than using notes, it remains a quick way to generate revenue. However, due to influencer slot fees and commissions, the cost can be too high for products with low profit margins. Hosting your own live streams then circles back to the issue of how to cultivate your own following,” he said.
Regardless, he noted that the least effective way of monetizing so far on the platform, according to internal data from Xiaohongshu is through influencer posts carrying merchandise links.
Discover more from Vino Joy News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
