Little Red Book, an online shopping and social networking platform in the Chinese mainland was founded in June 2013. This website claims to have 200 million users by January 2019. In Little Red Book community, users and celebrities can share product reviews and tourist destination introductions, namely ‘grass notes’. Little Red Book also names and sponsors several programs on the Internet and TV, bringing users and content growth to Little Red Book Some media have compared Little Red Book with Facebook’s Instagram.
The term “grass notes” is used in Internet parlance specifically to describe the act of promoting the good qualities of a product in order to make it an attractive purchase. Different from advertisements, “grass-growing people” are not businesses or promotion agencies, but professionals and folk experts on the forum. They are well-grounded, the picture is truth, and provide their own user experience without profit. In other words, a blogger uses her own experience to write a post that inspires fans to buy.
With the upgrading of consumption and the change of lifestyle, overseas shopping has gradually become the preferred lifestyle of the expanding new middle class, thus giving rise to new consumption patterns and e-commerce patterns. Overseas shopping grew to $165 billion in 2014, according to SAFE. On June 11, 2015, Accenture released a report predicting that the global B2C e-commerce market will maintain an average annual growth rate of 15% in the next few years, and the global cross-border e-commerce transaction volume will reach $994 billion in 2020, with China expected to become the world’s largest cross-border B2C consumer market.
Many males doesn’t know about Little Red Book, but Little Red Book is a must-have software for most young women in first — and second-tier cities. In the beginning, Little Red Book was an information-sharing platform for beauty cosmetics and overseas purchasing agents. Many female users shared their experience in collocation and beauty cosmetics on Little Red Book, and thus attracted more and more female users to enter. Later, Little Red Book also gradually developed into a women’s living community. The UGC content above not only included beauty makeup, overseas online shopping, dressing collocation but also extended to travel notes, emotions, life perception, etc.
Little Red Book herself does not define herself as an e-commerce company. The limitations of e-commerce companies are too great, including Alibaba and JINGdong in the whole field, and e-commerce companies in various vertical fields are getting narrower and narrower. Little Red Book defines itself as a content platform, a women’s life community, with unlimited potential and a more flexible development path. For this reason, Little Red Book also makes a special distinction between content and e-commerce business. The content platform is called little Red Book, and the e-commerce is called Little Red Book Mall.
If you have been recommending your product with a Wechat business mindset, the amount of notes you write will be very low, because the little red book will think you are recommending the product. Little Red Book likes original and high-quality notes very much. High-quality notes are the ones that no one has written before. You can write your own very professionally, which is different from others, and it will be more likely to be popular.
Many users of Little Red Book say the grass notes are as “addictive” as tobacco and lead to impulsive consumption.
Why are these notes so addictive?
First, the average user doesn’t think of it as an AD. On the page of Little Red Book, all the contents are sent out by personal accounts, which are the ostensibly personal experience of using products or sharing. However, these personal accounts have become a platform for some manufacturers to promote their products. When the author opened the little red book page for the first time, was ‘old aunt makeup young 10 years’, ‘novice must learn makeup skills’, ‘eye makeup tutorial’, ‘ugly woman after the amazing audience’ and other titles to attract, can not help but open to see.
Second, the video form is more direct than the text, and those ‘seeing is believing’ effects make it difficult for users to distinguish good and bad products through the video. Watch videos of bloggers changing through their makeup, and you’ll pay attention.
At the beginning of its establishment, Little Red Book required community users to be “real” consumers, and the information shared must also be a real shopping experience. However, with the promotion of the Little Red Book community’s commercialization, some professional promotion teams have also aimed at the “money path” of “planting grass notes”.
For me, the reason Why I like to use Little Red book is that it brings convenience to my life. For example, If I want to go to a restaurant and I don’t know if the restaurant is good, I will usually open the Little Red Book and check out other people’s experiences. Or whenever I buy a skincare product or cosmetics, I will open the Little Red Book and read others’ comments on it. Different from WeChat, WeChat makes communication between people more convenient, while Little Red Book brings convenience to daily life.
I will also share my personal experience in Little Red Book. The link above is for my personal homepage.
This is a post about the Guerlain foundation. I’ve written about food, about beauty, about life. But it was the beauty posts that were found to be more attractive.
