The RED MiniProgram has created a direct path from content creator posts to product or service listings, including ecommerce capability.
This year saw both Douyin and TikTok give businesses a direct path between content creators or adverts to purchasing products. WeChat has been doing the same for a long time linking content through to its CRM for businesses the longer sales cycles.
Now Little Red Book or Xiaohongshu has joined in with its own MiniProgram launch
MiniPrograms follow WeChat’s more flexible path for user destinations, encompassing e-commerce, service descriptions and other functionality that can be built up by developers.
Where Xiaohongshu started life as a sharing app purely for shopping, it has found a role for sharing content about businesses of all types.
Here at Emerging Comms, we’ve successfully used it to promote consumer goods, universities and high-end property.
The MiniProgram gives an in-app destination for the many different types of content on Xiaohongshu
- Account pages
- Product-tagged posts
- Livestreams
- In-app private messages
- App-opening ads
- H5 pages
- Discovery feed ads
- Influencers’ livestream feed ads
It can also point users off to other platforms like WeChat (for the moment ) and into its own direct messaging platform.
The link into DM’s gives it a role for customer service and businesses with longer sales cycles that need one-to-one touch points to close a deal.
The MiniProgram launch is in beta phase at the moment and very much focused on higher-end consumer goods but Xiaohongshu’s broad appeal is likely to be matched by the functionality of this new extension to its platform
