App Critique: Why 小红书(RED) is so popular in China?

小红书(RED, pinyin: Xiaohongshu) is a social media and e-commerce application that was created in 2013 (Wiki).

RED is one of the most popular mobile apps among young generations (born after 1985), and probably the most popular app among young female in China. By January 6th, 2021, RED is ranking 12th in Apple App Store (https://www.appannie.com/en/apps/ios/top/china/overall/iphone/).

How does RED attract its users? Which features make it popular among young females? In this app critique, I want to briefly walk through the design of RED and analyze its functionalities.

How RED works?

Since RED is an app that was born in China, I will briefly introduce its features, content, and main users.

Main feature: Social Media

RED was initiated to create a community to review products and share shopping experiences. After 8 years of iterations, RED becomes a social, media, and e-commerce platform.

As a social app, RED allows anyone to share content o the platform. Creating an account is super easy: registering with other app accounts such as Weibo or WeChat, or one-click phone number registration. In China, most apps require people to register with their real names, so email and password signup is very uncommon in China.

The design of the RED is very straightforward, with minimal distractions. RED has a Pinterest-style layout: pictures, videos, and live streamings are aligned as infinite feeds. Once entered this page, users will be immediately attracted to the content and start to browse. In this way, RED could increase its user engagement.

Similar to other apps in China, RED is also a multi-purpose app. Besides media, it also provides social and e-commerce features. Social is closely attached to the media, as users could read posts by other users or send direct messages to other users. Other commonly used social features, such as leave comments, or like posts, are also available on RED.

RED has a highly personalized recommendation system. From my personal experience, the algorithm takes into account not only “search”, but also staying time, number of likes, tags, etc. The algorithm is smart enough to adjust the content while the user scrolls. Based on users’ browsing history, RED could recommend similar content below.

RED also provides users with location-based recommendations. RED could automatically detect the user’s location and retrieve posts nearby. Based on different user preferences, ie. restaurant seekers or frequent shoppers, RED could recommend posts of different categories for the user. This personalization has a more specific targeting purpose.

RED’s e-commerce: a different online shopping experience

Besides reviewing and recommending, RED also runs its own e-commerce platform: Hong Mall.

Since millions of users are using RED to read, post, and share product/experience reviews, RED cleverly embed online shopping with its reviewing features. For example, a blogger might recommend a skincare product in a post, and the users could easily find the purchase link under the post, which leads to a product in Hong Mall. In RED, many merchants promote products through bloggers.

Live streaming is frequently used to promote and recommend products. Users often see live streaming posts when browsing feeds. If a live streaming post is about product recommendations, there will also be product links inside the post itself, which provide users an easy way to make the purchase.

Unlike other apps in China, which have distinct product features for each tab, RED combines its main social media feature and e-commerce feature seamlessly. The business model of promoting a product through bloggers also give users a unique online shopping experience. Even without seeing the actual product, the users could still get “haptic” feedback through bloggers. In this way, users will be more likely to make the purchase than other types of online shopping.

Why Chinese girls love RED?

The business model of RED is proved to be successful. It creates a sustainable community between merchants, bloggers, and normal users. On the one hand, anyone could be a blogger by posting high-quality posts. Once become a blogger with a significant number of fans, users could partner with various merchants to promote their products and make money. On the other hand, normal users could read high-quality and reliable product/experience recommendations on RED.

RED vs. Instagram

Instagram also runs a similar business model: embed ads inside posts. What are the differences between RED and Instagram? RED and Instagram have different feature prioritization: in RED, exploration is the main feature so on the home page posts are from not-followed users; in Instagram, following is the main feature so on the home page users will see posts from followings. Even though on a different tab, RED also has a page for “following” posts (similarly Instagram also has an exploration page on a secondary tab).