Xiaohongshu 2025 trend forecast + cutting-edge strategy sharing

This article deeply explores the four major trend sectors of Xiaohongshu in 2025, including new grass-planting methodology, new map of local life business growth, new strategies for attracting traffic and acquiring customers, and cutting-edge strategies for closed-loop e-commerce and spillover e-commerce.

If you look back from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, you will find that Xiaohongshu has changed a lot this year.

There are probably not many brands that can implement the 2023-24 annual strategy unchanged, but big changes are a good thing, indicating that this is a platform that is developing and growing rapidly.

For this kind of growing platform, as long as you can keep up with the changes of the platform, you can share the platform dividends. This year, some "red brand" trends have begun to emerge, and the opportunities may be greater next year.

If you plan to continue to explore Xiaohongshu next year, you must understand the following four trend sectors:

1. The “new” method of planting grass under the emphasis on crowd management

Xiaohongshu is a crowd business, not a traffic business

Douyin is a media with no values, and is just a place to provide entertainment content; Xiaohongshu is a community with values, i.e. ordinary people helping ordinary people.

Crowd management will bring business results, traffic management will only bring data results. Public domain data will always belong to the platform, and business results can be pocketed.

If a brand wants to do well on Xiaohongshu, the first thing it should do is to treat people as people, not as traffic.

Therefore, refined crowd management must be the new tone of Xiaohongshu's grass-roots marketing in the next few years. All new strategies need to be based on crowd management as the foundation.

2. New growth map of local lifestyle business

When I was communicating with Xiaohongshu’s official colleagues, I received a very clear signal that Xiaohongshu’s local life section has received internal support and resource allocation, and it is a section that Xiaohongshu must do well and focus on in the next few years.

Based on the UGC content accumulated over the years, Xiaohongshu has formed a structural advantage in search. The experience sharing of a large number of real users has gradually made Xiaohongshu a consumer decision-making scenario for local life needs. It can be said that the search advantage shown by Xiaohongshu has begun to have a huge impact on local life platforms such as Meituan, Dianping, and Ctrip.

Xiaohongshu Local Life may be the new business growth for local life merchants

3. Draining and acquiring customers

Traffic generation and customer acquisition have always been an eternal problem for enterprises.

There are two platforms that have greatly helped companies acquire customers in this era. One is Douyin, which has increased the scale of customer leads and enabled companies of different types and businesses to acquire customers based on Douyin. However, Douyin's commercialization process is too fast, and the dividends are too short. The cost of acquiring customers is already difficult for companies with meager profits to accept.

Another one might be Xiaohongshu. Although the number of leads is not as large as Douyin, the quality of the audience is better and the cost of acquiring customers is lower. It has been of great help to industries such as education, wedding photography, franchise, custom decoration, and international freight forwarding.

In the next few years, the customer acquisition sector will also welcome more supporting tools and more merchants. Perhaps, Xiaohongshu platform is one of the few platforms in this era where the customer acquisition cost is still profitable.

4. Closed-loop e-commerce + spillover e-commerce

Who says Xiaohongshu can only be used to promote products? This year, we have seen the value that Xiaohongshu brings to brands in both closed-loop e-commerce and spillover e-commerce.

This year, the three-domain integration strategy based on public domain, private domain, business domain + merchant store broadcast, buyer distribution, and merchant sales notes has been fully verified within our company, helping multiple merchants to improve the ROI of Xiaohongshu

As Xiaohongshu's closed-loop e-commerce is a new trend, we will also make a larger layout around Xiaohongshu's e-commerce next year. We also call on everyone to pay attention to Xiaohongshu's closed-loop e-commerce. When making the 2025 annual plan, we can appropriately increase the layout of Xiaohongshu's e-commerce sector.

Xiaohongshu users are becoming more and more accustomed to making consumption and purchasing decisions on Xiaohongshu, and are also becoming more and more accustomed to buying products on Xiaohongshu. The e-commerce sector has become mature. It is time for brands that have created a lot of grass-planting content on Xiaohongshu in the past two years to start "harvesting".