With the cancellation of brand tags, Xiaohongshu moves towards "Tiktokization"!

From being unknown to suddenly becoming popular, and from being popular all the way to now, Xiaohongshu has firmly occupied the market.

In the past few years, the content on Xiaohong Book has become uneven, and its commercial taste has become more and more serious, and it lacks the taste of sincere sharing back then.

So this year, Xiaohongshu started to take action.

1. Clean up and sort out and cancel brand marks

Starting from January 5, Xiaohongshu upgraded the Dandelion brand marking component and upgraded the original "brand cooperation marking component" to "brand marking component" . Brands can independently choose to display or not display based on marketing demands, regardless of whether it is displayed or not, there is no additional fee.

From then on, if the brand is willing, the blogger's report notes will no longer display the "cooperation bid". Before January 5, Dandelion notes that have been released and have not been released no longer display the brand cooperation logo by default.

The cooperation target is an embarrassing existence. On the one hand, it can prove its commercial value at the brand level, and on the other hand, it "dissuaded" some fans due to its advertising nature.

In March 2020, Xiaohongshu launched the brand cooperation transaction function, and the platform began to manage the operation of commercial notes, including content cooperation notes. The cooperation between the brand and bloggers needs to be reported on the platform.

The page of the cooperation notes will be marked with relevant notes at this time.

Starting from August 2021, commercial notes will not display advertising or sponsored marks in the information flow recommended by organic traffic, but will only display brand cooperation marks in the lower left corner of the picture of the notes, with a display duration of 5 seconds.

At this time, the user clicks on the cooperation logo and will jump to the corresponding brand number homepage, and the purpose of the brand promoting the product will be completed.

2. Decommercialization is the road to self-save?

The outside world believes that Xiaohongshu is further weakening users' perception of advertisements and giving users an experience closer to ordinary notes.

For the brand’s cooperation target upgrade, the brand has shown the cooperation target, and the notes are hard advertising. Without the cooperation target, the notes are soft advertising.

Whether it is a brand or a blogger, they definitely want the advertisement to be as soft as possible, and it is best not to see that it is an advertisement. If you cannot see the cooperation target, you may have a higher willingness to interact with comments and can also help this note to go to the next larger traffic pool.

Despite this, this may not necessarily realize the idea of ​​doing content and business well. After all, the premise of doing content is not whether to display cooperation targets, but whether the publisher has a sincere heart to share when creating content. If he is determined to make money or how to attract more traffic, he will not be able to produce good content.

If you encourage good content, the system you set up should reward content creation with sincere sharing , rather than whether to check the display logo.

3. Is the future promising to accelerate the Douyinization?

In addition to the upgrade of the brand tag component, Xiaohongshu in 2023 has another change. In the new version, the "shopping" entrance of the original Tab column at the bottom was replaced by "video" and appeared in the second column of the homepage.

It is said that the user experience is basically similar to short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou. They both swipe up and down to switch videos, and also have functions such as likes and comments.

After the video streaming was launched, Xiaohongshu's advertising tool "Site-wide Smart Investment" added video streaming scenarios, and perhaps "de-labeling and upgrading" can be regarded as the preparation for Xiaohongshu's efforts to plant short videos.

At the same time, advertisers have a lot more choices, but smart investment in the entire site depends on whether the content matches user preferences, and optimize the delivery effect through intelligent learning.

According to insiders of Xiaohongshu, on December 30 last year, 100% of the video streams of Xiaohongshu were launched, and there was a large amount of video materials in the buying space.

Compared with B station and WeChat, Xiaohongshu has always been cautious in exploring videos.

After the video account was launched in August 2020, after two years of development, many top UP owners of B station have synchronized videos on Xiaohongshu in the past two years. Currently, the proportion of video content in Xiaohongshu's content exposure has reached 45%.

This update of the APP version seems to be more "Tiktok-like". For Xiaohongshu, which tends to be video-oriented, can bring more user retention and activity to Xiaohongshu, which starts with graphic notes, but the challenges are still not small in the long run.

On the one hand, the genes of Xiaohongshu are community content and atmosphere. It needs to avoid the production of fast-food short videos, and also avoid homogeneity with Douyin;

On the other hand, Xiaohongshu also has to face competition from Douyin and Bilibili, which are also good at content, and it is still unknown how much of the market it can win.

In short, I hope Xiaohongshu can break through. After all, for now, more and more channels are good for merchants and brands. I also hope that merchants who are interested in Xiaohongshu can make arrangements early and seize the opportunity!