Little Red Book Influencer Marketing: 3 Things to Check Before Spending Your Money
So you've heard that Little Red Book is hot and WeChat is becoming a more mature platform, almost a thing of the past, especially if you are looking to market beauty, fashion and luxury goods.
Little Red Book is definitely the new trending platform, and just like how influencers all made moves to set up their presence on TikTok when the new and hot platform came along, WeChat users are all migrating to Little Red Book or at least working to build both audiences at the same time.
If you want to engage influencers on Little Red Book, you need to check these 3 things before putting any money down. Remember, our team of Chinese Influencer Marketing Specialists is here to help you with high-performance, relevant influencers.
What are high-performance, relevant influencers?
As part of our Catalyst Method, we identify influencers with:
A high engagement rate - on Little Red Book, a high engagement rate for a popular organic post can be over 10%! This is much higher than pay-to-play social platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
An active local following with interests relevant to the client brand (ie. if the Client is in the travel industry, an influencer’s statistics can show the top interests of her followers)
Previous content or collaborations in your brand category/industry. The influencer should have an obvious interest in the Client’s product category, or better yet, brand collaborations in the same industry vertical or tangent industries.
Avoid These 3 Traps with Little Red Book Influencer Marketing
Now...on to the 3 traps to avoid with Little Red Book Influencer Marketing:
My profile only has 1141 followers but my posts have generated over 10,000 engagements, so a small following doesn’t necessarily mean low engagement. Similarly, an account with a large following doesn’t guarantee it will outperform a smaller influencer.
The bigger the following the better! NOT the case. Who cares if they have a huge following if 90% of their followers are in China if you're selling products to the North American market? Is that exposure going to drive awareness, interest, and conversions for your brand? Probably not. Ask your prospective influencers for their performance statistics. It will look something like the screenshot below. They can see their following down to the city level. We've seen some large accounts in North America that have the majority of their followers in Shanghai, Shenzhen, etc. So if you're setting up shop in North America, save your money and find a smaller influencer with a loyal, local following instead.
A large following does not mean they can lend their personal brand to different content categories. Whoa that was a lot of words. Now, once more in plain English: Just because they have a big following on Little Red Book doesn't mean they can post cooking videos all the time and then suddenly partner with a brand to sell sofas, or shoes, or makeup. You may THINK this will get you tons of exposure, but the Little Red Book algorithm is smart, and it will detect this activity as potential sponsored activity on the platform and penalize the influencer post with cutting the views on the post down to zero. Another reason why the algorithm would penalize this type of content is because it thinks viewers of cooking videos wouldn't suddenly want to see the content creator sell sofas or post an OOTD video; Little Red Book prefers to group their influencers into content verticals. For example, take a look at my profile screenshot below, I'm categorized as a foodie blogger, so if I start posting OOTD posts, I would probably get a tenth of the views in comparison to my other posts.
How high is a high engagement rate on Little Red Book? One of my friends always used to say "well, it's all relative". Coming from working with Instagram influencers where clients may have a target of a 4% engagement rate for influencer accounts, we love how Little Red Book shows Creators exactly how they are doing, RELATIVE to other Creators in the same vertical.
The great thing with Little Red Book is you can see the comparative performance. When you post a video on Little Red Book, your statistics will show you whether you performed above average or below average in comparison to other Creators in the vertical. For example, in the screenshot below, you can see that the clickthrough rate is 80% above average, the interactions are 90% above average, and the increase in new followers from this post is also 90% above average. One area of improvement is the video completion rate, which was 73% lower than average. This means that while the cover photo and headline for the post were engaging enough to generate the click, people didn't finish watching the video.
You can use insights like these to evaluate relative Chinese Influencer performance on Little Red Book BEFORE engaging them, AND you can also use it to evaluate their performance specifically for your sponsored post AFTER your campaign. These statistics are available on a PER POST level. Can't you tell how much we love numbers?
The bottom of this screenshot shows my comparative performance for this post in comparison to other food bloggers. The clickthrough rate is 7.9%, which is higher than 80% of other food bloggers and there are 230 interactions, which is higher than 90% other food bloggers. Comparative statistics help you figure out which influencer is delivering better results for you.
Remember: If it's not being tracked you don't know if your money is working for you!
Ready to find out more about how your brand can work with Chinese Influencers on Little Red Book? Get in touch at info@catalystagents.com so our Little Red Book Marketing Specialists can set up your Chinese social media strategy!