The "community Convention" of the little red book is a basket, where it needs to be installed. On May 6, xiaohongshu released the community business convention. From the name, we can see that xiaohongshu is starting to plant grass and commercialize this time. As an important supplement to the "community Convention" issued in April last year, the "community business convention" further regulates the behavior of platform merchants and brands, including guiding merchants' brand professional number certification and operation, intra platform transactions, and opposing "false grass planting" and malicious competition at the marketing level.
Author Li Hezi
If you pay attention to the relevant reports of xiaohongshu in the past, you will find that many of the above measures are xiaohongshu's response to its long-standing problems.
For example, to guide merchants to authenticate their professional brand numbers and operate in the community with a clear identity, the corresponding problem is that there are a large number of notes in the platform under the banner of planting grass, which are actually business promotion notes, which often bring wrong guidance to users; Another example is that the content required to be released is based on real experience and opposed to "false grass planting", which corresponds to events such as "Pink Beach filter" which continued to brush the screen last year. Not long ago, in early April, the economic daily also published a comment saying that the "false grass planting notes" were overdrawing the foundation of grass planting economic trust.
In the community business convention released this time, little red book actually defines what is "false grass planting" and gives its own ultimate solution - the following two are the most interesting provisions:
"Please complete the transaction in the platform and protect the rights and interests of both parties", and "please seek content cooperation with the creator through the dandelion platform".
This means that xiaohongshu is no longer tangled and directly and clearly informs platform users that it opposes all practices of cooperation and transactions bypassing the platform. Moreover, xiaohongshu seems very tough and resolute this time - Yin Shi, the head of xiaohongshu community ecology, made it clear at the media exchange meeting on the community business convention that "if everyone (business brand) has behaviors that do not comply with the business convention, we will also take some governance actions".
To put it bluntly, all grass planting that does not share accounts with xiaohongshu is playing hooligans.
In fact, rather than saying that the "community business convention" is a new regulation, it is better to say that the little red book has made a big summary of its series of efforts in community business ecological governance in the past year. Xiaohongshu also said that the Convention is "the first systematic expression of community business norms".
In terms of the above two most interesting provisions, in early August last year, many xiaohongshu service providers disclosed to the media that xiaohongshu had closed the permission to hang Taobao links in the notes with goods. At that time, Jess, the person in charge of xiaohongshu open platform and e-commerce, also responded, "we don't think it's an elegant way for the author to carry a commodity card in the notes".
Around the advertising business, xiaohongshu has also made a series of specifications and adjustments for the dandelion platform launched in January last year (Note: xiaohongshu's official commercial order service platform is similar to the commercial order service platform of Tiktok Xingtu and station B HuaHuo, formerly known as the "brand cooperation platform" launched in April 2020). For example, it stipulates that all business notes must be reported. At the same time, the platform draws 20% commission in both directions, and the creators and merchants each 10%; Last June, dandelion began to set the lowest quotation of KOL by the platform to avoid the low transaction price and the emergence of "Yin-Yang contract". In addition, at the end of July last year, xiaohongshu also began to severely crack down on soft wide notes, and suspected soft wide notes will be directly restricted.
However, under these measures, false grass planting still occurs frequently. A key reason is that xiaohongshu itself has always lacked more specific and legal provisions. Many times, like several other agreements in this Convention, it always conveys a certain color of "I'm good for you". This time, xiaohongshu has figured out that it is better to put the transaction under his own control than to deal with it in one step.
A closer look shows that "complete the transaction within the platform" and "seek the content cooperation with the creator through the dandelion platform", one corresponds to the trading transaction link (e-commerce) and one corresponds to the marketing link (advertising). Advertising and e-commerce are exactly the two major sources of revenue xiaohongshu relies on - according to the previous report, in 2021, 90% of xiaohongshu's revenue came from advertising and the remaining 10% came from e-commerce.
In other words, the benefits of the two provisions are directly linked. It seems that external pressure is coming to further curb false grass planting, but in fact, it kills two birds with one stone and strengthens its commercialization ability:
On the one hand, if the brand and merchants make false marketing and Koc receives private orders, it means that the platform cannot intervene in the marketing link, which will directly affect the cash ceiling of xiaohongshu; On the other hand, if the content is brought out of the chain, the e-commerce business of the platform will be difficult to exercise. If xiaohongshu wants to keep up with the expectation of rapid appreciation of capital, the fastest and most direct way is to develop the e-commerce business.
In terms of breaking the external chain, xiaohongshu, which started from "planting grass" and takes it as a unique community ecology, has been facing the same problem as short video platforms such as Tiktok and Kwai - how to let businesses and brands know that they are not just a marketing tool. Their long-term dilemma is that they rely on content to attract a large number of users, but because commercialization cannot be closed-loop, they can only become a drainage channel for e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and jd.com to make wedding clothes for others.
In the past, both short videos and "grass planting" platforms emphasized the need to gently get rid of the constraints of the old trading platforms with more voice, but now everything is changing dramatically. These new platforms can also use "coercion" to realize their will. Next, the focus of the outside world will be more on whether xiaohongshu's business infrastructure is perfect and whether it can meet the needs of business brands.
Xiaohongshu wants to understand. Now it depends on whether the business brand and users recognize it.