From the popularity of the “Hairpin Valley Bachelor’s Uniform”, to the rise of niche hobbies such as bird watching, pinching, and raising “Mangou”, to the explosive growth of two-dimensional, game and other content, the interest-based connection on Xiaohongshu has become increasingly close, and the activity of group chats has increased significantly. This article will explore how this shift relies on the UGC gene and its impact on community growth, user retention, and depth of connection, and analyzes Xiaohongshu’s path from “useful” to “interesting”.
Xiaohongshu is changing.
Just today, Xiaohongshu announced that Slogan has been upgraded from “Your Life Guide” to “Your Life Interest Community”, which means that the accent of the community has changed.
Previously, the outside world’s perception of Xiaohongshu was more based on real life experience and consumption decisions based on food, clothing, housing and transportation. But obviously, Xiaohongshu is no longer limited to this, life guides are not enough to accurately describe the outline of the community, and more personalized and non-rigid interesting content has already emerged. This kind of communication based on like-mindedness further strengthens the connection and communication between people, and the attribute of “community” becomes more and more prominent.
This is not the first time that changes have occurred in Xiaohongshu, just like the generalization of shopping guides to life guides in the past, and every brand upgrade means that the community is expanding. These expansions do not seem to be strongly promoted, but more like a content production mechanism based on community UGC, constantly growing new long-tail supply to enrich the community connotation.
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From this dimension, Xiaohongshu has not changed.
The community is still the gene of UGC, and the product logic and traffic distribution mechanism are still the same, which is the underlying ability that continues to derive more subdivisions.
Under the combined effect of change and unchange, Xiaohongshu has invisibly completed a transformation from a useful search mind to a social network, and it is also an iteration of Xiaohongshu’s problem-solving ideas for community growth.
01 Non-ready-made and non-rigid content emerges
Last year’s trend was hairpin flowers, national style, and this year’s theme was “hairpin valley bachelor’s uniform” – pin their favorite anime peripherals to the bachelor’s uniform.
They did not stop at the completion of the explosive change, but shared their works on Xiaohongshu. In reality, there may be noises that you don’t agree with or dislike, but there are always “distant similarities” online, and the community will help them find like-minded people and communicate with each other without barriers.
In just one and a half months, nearly 10,000 related notes have emerged on the Xiaohongshu website, nearly 70 million users have watched the “Hairpin Valley Bachelor’s Uniform”, and the search volume of keyword entries has increased by 30 times year-on-year.
This seems to be a little different from the Xiaohongshu we inherently knew in the past: shopping guides, grass planting artifacts, life experience guides, these “ready-to-use”, “just needed” and “useful” are the background colors of Xiaohongshu. Nowadays, all kinds of interesting hobbies have emerged, and the “non-current”, “non-rigid need” and “useless” minds that heal the body and mind, please oneself, and enrich the spiritual world are also formed in Xiaohongshu.
For example, in the past two years, the most obvious thing about user perception is that the double-column waterfall on the homepage of Xiaohongshu can always find something new: from a niche hard-core hobby to the public to break the circle of birdwatching, which has become the real happiness and favorite of young people; various AI product discussions gushed out on Xiaohongshu during the Spring Festival; Rock climbing, night running and other sports check-in records are being shared more and more; There are also small hobbies that seem strange at first glance: kneading, raising “mango dogs” (taking care of mango pits into puppy shapes), collecting seeds, creating their own language, crocheting, and micro-carving on millet……
Beneath the seemingly calm surface, the water temperature in the community has quietly changed.
We can also get a glimpse of the annual trend changes in Xiaohongshu: the keywords of life in 2023 are citywalk, listening to persuasion, and conspicuous bags, and in 2024, it is “abstract”.
The word “abstract” accurately captures the emotional needs of the public, and “everything can be abstracted” is an attitude of deconstructing reality, a new paradigm of dialogue with life, which has a bit of a sense of penetrating reality. At the time of the annual count, there were more than 10 million notes related to abstraction.
From figurative to abstract, reflecting the dimension of lifestyle, it is no longer enough to cover the content of the Xiaohongshu community.
A set of data can more intuitively reflect these changes: in the past year, the scale of content related to Xiaohongshu has increased by 175%, game content by 168%, and technology and digital content by more than 150%. Even in such a niche as birdwatching, the size of releases has increased by 105%
Another important dimension that proves the rapid growth of interest content is group chat.
Group chat is the most important product form for social and community products, and so far, WeChat group chat is the place where user stickiness indicators and commercial value are carried.
In the past year, Xiaohongshu’s group chat daily activity has increased by nearly 70% year-on-year, and more than half of the group chats are related to interest topics. More than 50% of Xiaohongshu’s interest groups are established by bloggers below the scale of thousands of fans. In other words, the motivation that brings them together is not star-chasing admiration, but resonates with each other at a certain point, and the group of friends is a like-minded relationship.
Different from “strong sharing records” and “weak connections” of life experience, hobbies are “strong communication orientation”, “strong connection”, and “high-frequency participation and interaction”.
No matter how subdivided the tentacles of interest are, there are corresponding group chat topics covered. This is determined by the genes and operational mechanism of community UGC.
02 Use UGC to grow
Within Xiaohongshu, “growth” is not often talked about. The discussion of growth is basically from the context of community development, not from external sources.
A person close to Xiaohongshu told us that last summer, Xiaohongshu reorganized the community development logic, and finally everyone reached a consensus: the word “growth” is too linear and inaccurate, and the development of the Xiaohongshu community is more like breaking the circle and expanding.
It does not expand in terms of demographic, geographical, and agency dimensions, but is driven by the method of “UGC + circle”, constantly seeking and stimulating factors that connect people, and believing in the compound interest of connecting people.
From life guide to life interests, it can be regarded as a continuation of Xiaohongshu’s “growth with the logic of UGC”.
According to the above-mentioned sources, Xiaohongshu has been thinking about how to build a huge and centripetal community in a long cycle while maintaining development vitality. Perhaps, “interest” is a good keyword.
Because the circle of interests is wide enough to cross demographic, geographical and intergenerational barriers and connect to a wider range of people. A student at Tsinghua University, a worker at an auto repair shop, or the owner of a listed company all like to run, and they may make connections here.
Xiaohongshu’s interests and hobbies have several dimensional characteristics: diverse, and interests are broad enough to connect to a wide range of people; at the same time, it should be subdivided enough, with less granularity, and it is easier to resonate with interest; In addition, it is growth, and users’ interests and hobbies in Xiaohongshu are not to show off, but to pay more attention to the process of communication.
A statistic shows that more than 2,500 interest tag circles are distributed on Xiaohongshu, and the genes of UGC determine that these subdivisions are still deriving and changing.
Before “interest” was clearly proposed, the interest circle existed in the community. It’s just not accented.
When Xiaohongshu made an annual summary of life trends in 2023, it noticed that a lot of sports, entertainment and other content reflecting public interest has grown on the site. Even many hot spots fermented on the whole network originated from Xiaohongshu. In the past two years, community operations have found signs of these clues, and in the past two years, they have taken a lot of actions to promote the growth of the UGC circle.
An example with a sense of contrast is the popularity of technology hotspots such as AI on Xiaohongshu. Whether it is circle hotspots such as AI love and independent development, or national discussions during the Spring Festival of Deepseek, these technology hotspots are increasingly born on Xiaohongshu.
This is inseparable from the insight of community operations into UGC content – when GPT first became popular, users on Xiaohongshu had a lot of discussion needs about “how to use AI to link with life”, not just at the level of productivity tools. This became the starting point of Xiaohongshu’s operation of the technology circle.
Another noteworthy change is that two-dimensional content has become the third largest vertical content in Xiaohongshu after food and fashion.
As early as April 2023, Xiaohongshu captured the characteristics of the new crowd circle through offline comic exhibitions and online two-dimensional crowd social needs – different from the inherent impression of two-dimensional “dead house” and “ACG” in the past, the new generation of young people is more willing to let two-dimensional life go to offline life and become their own identity label and social currency.
Based on this insight, they did not copy the traditional operation idea of “two-dimensional”, but cut into offline scenes such as play valley, comic exhibition and expansion and cosplay, focusing on the 2.5-dimensional interest circle, doing the integration of two-dimensional and three-dimensional, and grasping the group of people who entered reality and projected their spirit offline.
Born in 1994, blogger @sharkshark people, majoring in visual communication in college, is a senior “two-dimensional”. But unlike the traditional two-dimensional concept we understand, Shark Man not only makes a career out of making a series of “millet”, but also uses his skills to help his 80-year-old grandfather sell 2,000 pounds of lychees. Her story quickly became popular on Xiaohongshu as soon as it was released.
To some extent, this is the 2.5 dimension of Xiaohongshu’s temperament. The story of the shark shark man is not an isolated case, today on Xiaohongshu, the number of views of the relevant notes about millet alone has reached 5.4 billion, and the number of discussions has reached nearly 50 million.
An Internet product operation summary said that Xiaohongshu’s community operation is not Internet logic, but sociological logic.
03 Deeper connection and longer retention
The Internet pattern is becoming more and more solidified, and many products are stuck in bottlenecks, and Xiaohongshu may be one of the few products that still maintain contrarian growth.
A footnote is that Xiaohongshu’s successive upgrades to Slogan are all due to community expansion, and the original theme is not enough to cover the existing outline.
In 2015, Xiaohongshu positioned itself as an overseas shopping guide, and the corresponding Slogan was “good things in the world”. However, when Xiaohongshu pours into ordinary amateurs, user needs extend from shopping to sharing life, almost inadvertently completing a category expansion, carrying richer content. In 2017, Xiaohongshu’s Slogan became “Good Life All Over the World”. In the second year, the value of “things” was weakened and directly pointed to “marking my life”.
In 2022, the community will be further generalized, and a sentence on the homepage of Xiaohongshu will become “Your Life Guide”. This sentence carries Xiaohongshu’s “useful” mentality. Because of the massive UGC content, behind it are all “living people” experience sharing. Xiaohongshu has attracted a large number of users to join, which is directly reflected in the rise in search volume on the site.
At the beginning of 2024, Xiaohongshu will account for 70% of monthly active users, 88% of active search users, and 42% of new users will use the search function on the first day they log in to Xiaohongshu.
At that time, there was a joke circulating in the rivers and lakes, not how powerful Xiaohongshu’s search algorithm was, but how good the content pool was.
This is an important watershed for Xiaohongshu, and to some extent, it completes the phased issue of “who will use it”. It was at the end of 2022 that Xiaohongshu’s MAU exceeded 300 million and DAU exceeded 100 million. Although the official number has not been officially announced since then, the size of the market continues to grow.
At the beginning of the year, because of the TikTok “refugee” incident, Xiaohongshu inadvertently completed another breakthrough of the circle, and while overseas users poured in, hot events were transmitted back to China, triggering a new wave of users to join, and the drive for growth can be imagined.
However, with the influx of massive users, the community must think about how to keep these people for a long time.
At the beginning of 2022, philosopher Liu Qing asked Xiaohongshu in an interview, “Is Xiaohongshu’s fun and aesthetic style tolerant enough? What is its relationship with the wider city-state of China?” He accurately pointed out that the key to community expansion is not demographic, but fun.
Xiaohongshu solved this problem in two or three years, and gradually grew into a community of complex and diverse life interests. Some people call this – Xiaohongshu’s “Shanghai flavor” has faded.
At the same time, the emergence of interest also activates the other two most important issues in the community, namely user stickiness DAU and consumption time. The growth of these two indicators represents the continuation of the vitality of the community.
The circle of interest is more leveraged in the stratosphere, and high-frequency communication means that user stickiness is enhanced. The surge in the number of group chats and daily active users is the best illustration. The establishment of discussion forums is not only in line with the genes of community UGC, but also an effective way to enhance user stickiness.
A person in charge of operations described Xiaohongshu’s discussion forum as follows: It is not a square like Weibo, where everyone stands in the center of the square and speaks, more like a tent outdoors. You can change from a tent that discusses camping to a tent that discusses dancing.
In addition, interest is a less useful thing in life, but it is a nutrient that enriches the spiritual world, and it is the place of long-term continuous investment, and the content consumption time will inevitably be extended.
The source that triggers these two indicators also goes back to the UGC gene of the Xiaohongshu community. The original meaning of UGC is, of course, “user-generated content”, with enough variety and long tail. This is also the reason why Douyin entered UGC, encouraged double-column graphic content, and Baidu re-invested in Tieba.
However, the prosperity of the UGC community cannot stop at content production, and the real release of UGC may be a decentralized distribution mechanism.
By giving more than 50% of its traffic to users with less than 1,000 fans every day, Xiaohongshu has changed the common one-to-many “broadcasting” model of content platforms, and established a dense and robust connection network between ordinary users, establishing a new trust relationship and online social capital.
This is a classic “social graph” problem.
Wired magazine wrote in 2013: How do you build enough trust if the person you connect with is a complete stranger? How exactly should we design a user’s social graph to make them like it here? This is a question that the next generation of social media should think about.
Perhaps there is also a secret hidden here that the Xiaohongshu community has been able to continue to expand.
