Little Red Book Marketing: How Brands Advertise and Sell on Xiaohongshu (RedNote)

Little Red Book marketing means reaching Chinese consumers on Xiaohongshu, also called RedNote, where users share notes, photos and short videos about products and lifestyle. Brands open an account, publish useful notes, work with creators through Pugongying, buy search and feed ads on Juguang, and can sell through a store run from Qianfan.

Key takeaways

• Xiaohongshu, called Little Red Book, RED or RedNote in English, is a lifestyle platform founded in Shanghai in 2013.
• QuestMobile counted 214 million monthly active users on average from January to October 2024, and users go there to discover products before they buy.
• Brands work with creators through Pugongying, Xiaohongshu’s official platform for content seeding and live-streaming collaborations.
• Ads are bought on Juguang, which covers both search results and the browsing feed.
• Merchants can open a store and sell in the app; a brand without a company in China can also sell through its own cross-border store.

What Is Little Red Book (Xiaohongshu)?

Little Red Book, also known as Xiaohongshu (小红书), RED or RedNote, is a lifestyle platform for young people, founded in Shanghai in 2013 by Mao Wenchao and Qu Fang, according to Xiaohongshu’s own presentation. Users record their daily lives and share their lifestyle in short videos and in notes that mix photos and text, and they connect around shared interests.

The platform combines user-generated content, lifestyle sharing, and e-commerce, and it plays a vital role in driving new consumer trends and supporting the growth of emerging brands. Its influence now extends beyond China, and a growing number of international brands and sellers use it.

The Rise of Little Red Book

The development of Little Red Book has been marked by continuous innovation in lifestyle content and community engagement. Launched as a social platform, it quickly gained traction by blending authentic user-generated content with shopping, and it stood out through its focus on daily life sharing, product recommendations, and a trusted community atmosphere.

Users post notes in the form of images, text, and videos, sharing their consumption experiences and lifestyles, which makes the platform highly interactive. Xiaohongshu says its monthly active users passed 100 million in October 2019, 70% of them born after 1990. Today, it is a go-to platform for users to share their lives, discover products, and exchange ideas.

Little Red Book Is Popular in China and Abroad

Little Red Book is now a preferred lifestyle-sharing platform for young people in China. QuestMobile counted 214 million monthly active users on average from January to October 2024, 11.9% more than in the same period of 2023.

Source: QuestMobile TRUTH China Mobile Internet Database, October 2024.

Little Red Book is a lifestyle-focused platform, featuring user-generated content in beauty, fashion, travel, food, and other areas of daily life.

It has successfully integrated social media and e-commerce, allowing brands to promote their products, engage with users, and sell directly on the platform.

Many international brands targeting the Chinese market use Little Red Book to better understand local consumer preferences and trends. Luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, one of the first to launch an account on Xiaohongshu in 2019, along with Gucci, Prada, Fendi, and Armani, use the platform for brand marketing.

RedNote in the United States

In early 2025, Little Red Book had no dedicated international version, but it gained traction overseas, particularly in the United States, where users started calling it RedNote, the name Xiaohongshu now uses for its English-language website. In January 2025, it reached the top of the free apps chart of the App Store in the United States.

This growth came from American TikTok users who expected TikTok to be banned in the United States in January 2025 and moved to RedNote, according to Reuters’ report on the arrival of TikTok users.

Little Red Book: Core Functions and Features

As a diversified platform that integrates social media, content sharing, and e-commerce, Little Red Book offers numerous distinctive features.

Content Diversity and Creative Freedom

• Supports user-generated content across a wide range of categories: beauty, fashion, travel, food, home decor, sports, technology, education, and more.
• Allows users to post multimedia content (images, videos, text), encouraging individual expression.
• Promotes authentic content creation, fostering a rich and engaging ecosystem.

Community Interaction and Social Network

• Enables users to follow others and build social connections through content.
• Offers interactive features such as likes, comments, bookmarks, and shares to boost engagement.
• Helps users discover new content and creators, expanding their interests and networks.

E-commerce Integration and One-Stop Shopping

• Embeds shopping functionality directly into the app.
• Provides product discovery, coupon offers, and limited-time discounts to improve the shopping experience.
• Encourages sharing of shopping experiences through “grass-planting” (种草, recommending a product) and “grass-plucking” (拔草, buying it), creating a community-driven shopping culture.

Smart Recommendation and Personalization

• Uses big data and machine learning to deliver personalized content.
• Allows users to customize their homepage based on interests and preferences.
• Helps users discover more relevant content and creators efficiently.

Vertical Communities and Specialized Content

• Builds focused communities around topics like beauty, fitness, or travel.
• Encourages the creation and dissemination of high-quality, niche content.
• Fosters deeper engagement and peer interaction within specialized circles.

Live Streaming and Real-Time Engagement

• Offers live streaming features for creators to share moments or showcase products.
• Enhances real-time interaction and participation.
• Strengthens the relationship between users and creators through direct communication.

Analytics and Content Optimization

• Provides data tools to help creators track performance and audience feedback.
• Enables optimization of content strategies based on performance data.
• Helps creators align better with market trends and user expectations.

What Xiaohongshu Can Bring to Merchants

Extensive Market Exposure

• With more than 200 million monthly active users, Xiaohongshu gives brands wide exposure.
• Its algorithm promotes content to users most likely to engage, maximizing visibility.
• Brands can also participate in trending challenges and platform-wide events to boost awareness.

Precise Target Audience

• Merchants gain access to demographic and behavioral data for effective audience segmentation.
• Tailored content (visuals, copywriting, formats) enhances engagement and conversion.
• The community nature of the platform enables deeper connection with the target audience.

Direct and Effective Engagement

• Encourages brands to build trust through authentic interaction.
• Enables real-time communication via comments and private messages.
• Live streaming offers a channel to demonstrate products and boost purchase intent.

Positive Reputation Building

• By publishing high-quality content and interacting with users on Xiaohongshu, merchants can gradually establish a good brand image and reputation.
• Xiaohongshu users are eager to share and recommend good products. Merchants can win users’ word-of-mouth promotion by providing high-quality products and services, expanding brand influence.
• Merchants can also invite well-known bloggers or opinion leaders for collaboration, further enhancing brand awareness and reputation through their recommendations and shares.

Brand Reputation and Word-of-Mouth

• Xiaohongshu frequently launches viral topics and campaigns.
• Brands can align with these trends through creative promotions like giveaways or flash sales.
• The platform’s ad system supports highly targeted and goal-driven campaigns.

How to Market Your Brand on Little Red Book

Little Red Book marketing combines three levers: your own notes, creators, and ads. Start with your notes, then add creators and ads.

Publish Useful Notes From a Brand Account

Start with an account for your brand and publish notes that are useful on their own: tutorials, product comparisons, behind-the-scenes content. Many young Chinese use Xiaohongshu to look for advice and tutorials instead of a search engine, and its content can only be searched inside the app, so write your notes around the words your customers search for. Notes that look too much like ads tend to underperform.

Work With Creators Through Pugongying

Creators give brands reach and trust. Brands find creators and manage paid collaborations on Pugongying (蒲公英), Xiaohongshu’s official platform for content seeding and live-streaming collaborations. Seeding, or 种草, means planting the desire for a product through authentic notes. Campaigns often combine a few large creators with many everyday users, called KOCs, whose reviews feel closer to a friend’s advice. Our guide to KOL marketing in China explains how to choose creators and how to pay them.

Buy Ads on Juguang

Paid reach comes from Juguang (聚光), Xiaohongshu’s one-stop advertising platform. It covers the two moments when users make decisions, when they search and when they browse their feed, and advertisers set goals such as product seeding, sales, lead collection, or live-stream promotion.

Can You Sell on Little Red Book?

Yes. Little Red Book has built-in shopping: users buy products without leaving the app, and merchants run their stores from Qianfan (千帆), Xiaohongshu’s seller platform, which also covers brand collaborations and data analysis. Xiaohongshu also runs campaigns to recruit new merchants.

A Xiaohongshu e-commerce campaign inviting new merchants to join, with free onboarding for a limited time.

Brands can also sell outside the app and use Xiaohongshu to build demand. If you do not have a company in China, a cross-border store lets you sell to China without a Chinese entity, with WeChat Pay in RMB and settlement in your own currency. Visibility and sales work together: for Huttopia, the glamping brand, we built a WeChat Mini Program where travelers book their stays and pay with WeChat Pay.

What Should You Do Next?

Xiaohongshu has earned wide popularity in China and abroad by combining authentic content, an active community, and built-in shopping. Its focus on authenticity, backed by content review, and its interactive user base have created a trusted platform where Chinese consumers discover products before they buy.

Start small and measurable: open a brand account, publish useful notes, test a few creators through Pugongying, then add Juguang ads. Decide early where the sale will happen: in a Xiaohongshu store, or in a store built for Chinese buyers by a cross-border e-commerce agency. For the WeChat side of your funnel, our WeChat agency builds Mini Programs and WeChat stores.

If you haven’t launched your brand’s Xiaohongshu account yet, now is the time: feel free to contact us to get started.

Frequently Asked Questions