Xiaohongshu upgraded its brand slogan from “Your Life Guide” to “Your Life Interest Community”, a change that has been brewing for a long time. This upgrade is not only a deepening from “tool attributes” to “community attributes”, but also implies its ambition to break the bottleneck of commercialization: expand the ecosystem layer by strengthening interest connections, open up cooperation with Taobao and JD.com to quantify grass planting links, and build a more differentiated core competitiveness while balancing community experience and commercial value.
Recently, Xiaohongshu announced that it has upgraded its brand slogan from “Your Life Guide” to “Your Life Interest Community”. Xiaohongshu is becoming more “national”, which has begun to show signs in a series of adjustments since Xiaohongshu last year.
In July last year, Xiaohongshu completed the transformation from “buyer e-commerce” to “lifestyle e-commerce”, not only focusing on the product itself, but also emphasizing the quality of life and emotional pursuit behind the product.
During this year’s 618 period, Xiaohongshu has reached cooperation with Taobao and JD.com, adding advertising links below the notes to open up the whole link from grass planting to purchase, which marks that Xiaohongshu will completely step out of the closed loop of self-built e-commerce and turn to global operation.
It can be seen that Xiaohongshu’s brand upgrade is not just a simple word game, but a long-awaited change. However, whether this breakthrough under the banner of interest can really make Xiaohongshu sail to a broader blue ocean may only be left to users to answer.
1. Let grass planting be realized
In June this year, according to Bloomberg, Xiaohongshu’s valuation has jumped to $26 billion, equivalent to 11 times the current market value of Weibo, 65 times the market value of Zhihu, and 3 times the market value of Bilibili.
Not only that, Xiaohongshu’s commercial value is also unique in the content platform, with its unique community attributes and content ecology, every Xiaohongshu note can become a clue to affect users’ consumption decisions.
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QuestMobile pointed out in 2020 that the average conversion rates of Douyin, Kuaishou, Weibo and Xiaohongshu were 8.1%, 2.7%, 9.1% and 21.4% respectively, and Xiaohongshu achieved a much higher conversion rate than other platforms.
But even so, the commercialization of Xiaohongshu is still difficult. Since last year, Xiaohongshu has undergone several rounds of organizational structure adjustments. In May last year, Xiaohongshu merged buyer operations and merchant operations to form an e-commerce operation department for the first time, but announced a split into multiple groups in less than a month; In April this year, Xiaohongshu once again announced that it would return buyer operations to the e-commerce industry team.
Since the beginning of this year, a number of Xiaohongshu executives have left one after another, including Zhao Weichen, head of Xiaohongshu’s commercial Internet industry, who has led the expansion of advertising cooperation in emerging fields such as e-commerce, online services, and games; Cang Xiang, the former technical head of the commercial platform who led the construction of the grass planting evaluation system; Wu Yingbing, head of the commercial middle office, etc.
Most of the middle and senior executives who left came from the commercialization department, and combined with the continuous adjustment of Xiaohongshu’s e-commerce positioning and organizational structure in recent years, although Xiaohongshu is good at bringing goods, it has always been trapped in the realization of “planting grass”.
In the early days, Xiaohongshu tried to promote commercialization through self-operated e-commerce, but due to shortcomings such as supply chain and performance capabilities, it had to turn to the community grass planting model, and once made many domestic beauty brands such as Hua Xizi and Perfect Diary popular.
However, as the Internet traffic dividend fades, the ceiling of brand advertising reaching is gradually emerging. Most users are planted in Xiaohongshu, but choose to trade completely off-site, and it is difficult for advertisers to evaluate the effect of advertising, and they are naturally more inclined to platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou that can clearly see conversion.
In addition, Xiaohongshu must also prioritize the experience of community users, and once there is too much advertising content, it will also affect user retention.
To this end, Xiaohongshu has refocused on the closed loop of e-commerce in the past two years, trying to achieve revenue growth through buyer e-commerce, live broadcast e-commerce and other businesses. However, Xiaohongshu’s user ecology determines that it is difficult to open the mass market as quickly as Douyin and Kuaishou. This year, in 618, Xiaohongshu directly gave up the promotion and launched a long-term event called “Friendship Market” instead.
It is not difficult to see that Xiaohongshu needs to do e-commerce and advertising in its own way:
First of all, Xiaohongshu does not want to be only a “tool person” for traffic distribution, but also to participate in traffic distribution. At the 2025 WILL Business Conference held at the end of last year, Xiaohongshu clarified three major directions for commercialization this year, including the need to measure and quantify “grass planting”.
Subsequently, Xiaohongshu has reached cooperation with Taobao and JD.com to open the link function in the comment area, and in the context of being able to clearly see the grass planting link, merchants will be more willing to advertise, and Xiaohongshu’s “grass planting” can be monetized.
Secondly, if Xiaohongshu wants to attract more advertisers, it must expand its ecosystem. Thanks to the positioning of the UGC community, today’s Xiaohongshu is not only a grass planting community, but also a daily habit of many users.
According to QuestMobile data, in the first quarter of 2025, the average daily search on Douyin will reach 5.3 billion, WeChat will exceed 1 billion daily searches, Xiaohongshu will average 600 million searches per day, and the average daily search on Baidu App will drop to 300 million.
However, the total traffic pool of the search field is limited, and if Xiaohongshu wants to increase revenue, it will either use “search” as a revenue tool to increase advertising revenue by increasing exposure costs; or expand the traffic pool to attract more merchants to advertise on Xiaohongshu.
Xiaohongshu chose the latter and will use the brand slogan “Your Life Guide” for three years, and upgrade it to “Your Life Interest Community”.
2. Set off a new round of “interest revolution”
Looking back at Xiaohongshu’s brand slogan since its inception, it also reflects changes in platform strategy and positioning. In the early days, Xiaohongshu’s brand slogans such as “Find good things abroad” and “Good things from all over the world” mainly served the self-positioning of the overseas shopping platform.
In 2018, Xiaohongshu’s brand slogan became “Mark My Life”; In 2022, Xiaohongshu changed its brand slogan to “Your Life Guide”, and recently upgraded it to “Your Life Guide”, but it always revolves around the purpose of “sharing life”.
Taking 2018 as the dividing point, while Xiaohongshu adjusted its brand slogan, the platform’s own attributes gradually shifted from “tool” attributes to content sharing communities, and the platform’s active users also jumped from 10 million to 300 million today.
This also shows that Xiaohongshu has gone from “useful” to “interesting”, which is a more likely path to commercialization. But it also brought an interesting discussion, Xiaohongshu directly ended up doing e-commerce, helping users find good products but unable to achieve commercialization, why did this road run through after becoming a content community in a roundabout way?
First of all, ecological genes determine how big a business can be. When Xiaohongshu focuses on being a niche e-commerce platform, it often determines the type of user group of the platform.
According to Qiangua data, Xiaohongshu users are mainly young women, concentrated in 18-34 years old, mainly distributed in first- and second-tier cities, pursuing fashion and a better life, and have strong willingness and ability to consume.
But this has also become Xiaohongshu’s current growth bottleneck, which has covered about 70% of female users in high-tier cities, and this niche positioning is not only Xiaohongshu’s “trump card”, but also the “shackles” of the platform.
Xiaohongshu is also trying to find ways to enrich the member ecosystem, investing 2 billion traffic to support male content creators in 2021; Last year, Xiaohongshu began to attack the sinking market, pushing and pulling new ones in large business districts, subway stations, and even vegetable markets.
In addition, Xiaohongshu is also further enriching its content ecology, and in January this year, it opened its doors to welcome “TikTok refugees”; in February, the short drama channel was officially launched; In March, it reached cooperation with two major e-sports events, Honor of Kings and Intrepid Contract. From going overseas, to short dramas, to e-sports, Xiaohongshu is bidding farewell to “small and beautiful” and beginning to transform into a popular platform.
Secondly, use “interest” to drive the long-tail supply of the platform ecosystem. In addition to changing the inherent impression of Xiaohongshu’s “her economy”, “interest” can also further help the platform tap user value.
It is reported that there are more than 2,500 subdivided interest tags on the Xiaohongshu platform, and even many seemingly niche hobbies such as raising “mangou”, hoarding paper bags, and collecting seeds, and each note related to hobbies can receive an average of more than 10 comments.
More popular hobbies such as two-dimensional and games have increased by 175% and 168% year-on-year respectively in the past year, and interest has also led to more frequent interaction and deeper social interaction, and interest group chats account for more than half of Xiaohongshu’s “group chat”.
In order to further drive users to share and express their interests and hobbies, Xiaohongshu has also upgraded its content sharing tools, such as the recent launch of a long article function, and AI-empowered creation, which supports AI to automatically generate cover pictures and article summaries.
From exploring new content sections to enriching content forms, Xiaohongshu encourages creators to share their interests in more diverse ways, and at the same time output knowledge, opinions, stories, and content more deeply, which not only enhances the breadth of the content ecosystem, but also further explores the depth.
When Xiaohongshu can become a complex and diverse enough community of life interests, it can further activate more diversified content creators, let more niche interests and hobbies “settle down” in Xiaohongshu, and users can achieve deeper social networking on the platform and maintain long-term stickiness.
3. Build a “defensive wall” against the opponent
To some extent, Xiaohongshu has become the most successful UGC content community in China, but all content communities seem to experience the same problem, that is, how to balance users and ecology after breaking the circle.
Some time ago, the news that the “straight man community” Hupu sold itself for 500 million yuan made many old users feel embarrassed, and looking forward, community platforms such as Tianya and Renren are also difficult to escape the fate of bankruptcy.
The rise of mobile Internet has changed the way of content dissemination and the audience’s habit of receiving information, if the content community platform guards its own one-third of an acre of land, the traffic will be divided by other platforms and then go bankrupt, Hupu and Douban are typical examples;
If the content platform transforms too rapidly, it will also cause huge damage and dilution to the original content ecology of the platform, such as Zhihu after accelerating commercialization, like a novel platform, like a Weibo hot list, but not like Zhihu itself.
In order to achieve commercialization of content community platforms, it is necessary to expand the user circle, but the original uniqueness of the platform will also be diluted because of this, and it is inevitable that the platforms will become more and more similar.
Therefore, if Xiaohongshu wants to achieve a breakthrough in commercialization, it needs a more differentiated and more irreplaceable value, which falls on users, that is, whether they can find a sense of belonging on the platform.
“Interest” is a good entry point, which can not only support the inclusiveness of scale expansion, but also deeply connect different circles, and this deep resonance based on interest is far from comparable to the “like friendship” of pan-traffic platforms. More importantly, interest-driven content naturally has the characteristics of “non-utilitarian”, which can not only undertake the commercial needs of “planting grass”, but also maintain the emotional temperature of the community.
However, Xiaohongshu is not the only platform that uses interest social networking as an entry point, Douyin proposed interest e-commerce, and Soul proposed interest social …… How can Xiaohongshu shape the “interest community” into a moat for the platform?
First, how does Xiaohongshu do a good job in traffic distribution and scheduling. At present, most social platforms adopt a centralized traffic distribution model, which weakens the community atmosphere, but can quickly create explosive models and form commercial conversions.
In contrast, Xiaohongshu is a decentralized traffic distribution platform, although it can expose more unpopular content, but it is difficult to systematically organize users, thereby amplifying users’ desire to consume, and ultimately connect with commercialization.
Therefore, Xiaohongshu also needs to further explore and improve the platform’s scheduling capabilities, so that creators, users, and platforms can form a closed loop to help users quickly match personalized and trustworthy content and products.
Second, whether ecological synergy can be realized. Nowadays, content platforms are evolving in the direction of “big and comprehensive” to tap as much user value as possible, and the competition of content platforms has also shifted from the ultimate competition of a single form to the collaborative competition of ecological capabilities, which also tests Xiaohongshu’s organizational and management capabilities.
For example, after foreigners frantically poured into Xiaohongshu at the beginning of the year, the platform tried to attract small and medium-sized merchants to test the waters overseas with “zero fans to open stores”, but many merchants complained that Xiaohongshu users’ returns, logistics and other issues were in a hurry to “go overseas” before they understood them; Some merchants also said that their products are not suitable for going overseas and are invited to join the program.
From “Your Life Guide” to “Your Life Interest Community”, Xiaohongshu is trying to reshape “interests” into a new social currency in the future content community, and it is also a reweaving of user minds and community relationships.
How big a wave this “interest revolution” can finally set off is not only decided by Xiaohongshu, but by the cognition of users to determine whether these “useless loves” can eventually converge into a “galaxy”.
What Xiaohongshu can do is to invest more ability and determination in this process, and raise the upper limit of the “life interest community” as much as possible, in order to create a “new look” of the content platform belonging to Xiaohongshu. The copyright of the first image and accompanying picture of the cover of the article belongs to the copyright owner. If the copyright holder believes that his work is not suitable for viewing or should not be used for free, please contact us in time, and this platform will correct it immediately.
