Chinese Social Media: How to Analyze Your Video Post Performance on Little Red Book
Your video got 5000 views! Is that good? Bad? Or just so-so?
This blog post will teach you what to pay attention to if you’re a brand or content creator on Little Red Book. Let us dive right into the metrics!
We selected a recent video post that performed well to analyze each of the metrics you can view in your Content Creator account on Little Red Book. This post’s engagement rate was quite high with over 420 likes, saves, shares, and comments as of this writing. It also added 148 new followers to my account and was shared 52 times.
We picked one of our recent video posts showcasing a local neighbourhood cafe that performed well. The interesting thing with the views on this post as shown on the graph is that the views picked up when we hit the weekend after a slump during the w
VIEWS
From reviewing over 100 video posts that we’ve shared on our owned and client Little Red Book accounts, the trend is that you see the most traffic in the first 2 days. The best practice is to post during the weekend because historically, users on Little Red Book are most active over the weekend. If we look at the reference screenshot above that shows the graph depicting the views over time, the interesting thing is that the video views actually go back UP after 7 days when we hit Saturday.
AVERAGE WATCH TIME
With videos, one of the most important metrics is: did people actually watch your video? Or did they just swipe to the next post? The average watch time for our reference post is 26 seconds, which is well beyond the standard 3 to 6 seconds that would make the view count as an engaged viewer. If you see that your followers and viewers are only spending a few seconds on your video, this means that you need a stronger starting frame for your video. It’s almost like an elevator pitch for your viewers to stay and watch the rest of your video, so you want to open strong!
VIDEO COMPLETION RATE
They watched your video, but they didn’t finish watching it, what’s the deal? Little Red Book’s individual post metrics show you at what point your viewers left the video. There could be a few different reasons for viewers to leave the video. Some people save a post so they could come back to it later so they don’t finish watching the video, while others feel they’ve gotten the most important points already so they swipe to the next post. If you can determine when and where your videos start losing viewers, you can refine your storyline and video shots to make more captivating content.
The screenshot above shows when viewers left the video. To increase your video view completion rate, test which video segments and frames extend the watch time on your video.
The video completion rate for our reference post (which is an actual post on my own Little Red Book account) had an 11% completion rate. What I see through my video posts is that while the average watch time is quite good at close to 30 seconds, the completion rate is consistently low. This may mean that I need to add more segments to the video so viewers can anticipate what comes next so they don’t leave the video. On Little Red Book, once you unlock your Creator Account and have more than 500 followers, you can start adding ‘key moments’ in your video just like on YouTube, so your viewers can easily skip forward and back to find the key moment that interests them.
LIKES
Of course, likes are important, and Little Red Book values this metric over the saves that are generated by a post. This is interesting because, amongst marketers, we would think that a save adds more value because it means the viewer is interested enough to want to revisit the content piece.
On Little Red Book there are content challenges which can help you earn free video views for your content and often the criteria would be something like “create 2 videos this week and earn 60 likes to get 3000 free content views!” This conditioning tactic by the platform shows that it values likes over saves and shares as an engagement.
SAVES
When we are working with a client or running an influencer campaign, the Catalyst Method actually places the most emphasis on saves and shares. Why? Because saving a post means you want to return to it at a later date, and sharing a post means additional exposure for our client brands.
If we think of the marketing funnel using the Awareness — Interest — Desire — Action model, awareness would be tied to post views, while interest can be measured by average watch time and video completion rate; we would say that saving a post or sharing a post shows that the prospect is now in the Desire category, and therefore of higher value to our clients.
COMMENTS
Little Red Book’s algorithm also places a high emphasis on the number of comments because this is a metric that is visible to other members of the community, while saves and shares are only seen by the Content Creator. This is why posts that drive more comments are ranked higher and thus receive more exposure from the platform. There are tips and tricks to get more views on a post, such as not mentioning the name of the shop or leaving out the address to prompt your followers to ask questions in the comments section.
For beauty and skincare posts, there are often questions about the efficacy of the product, how the product should be integrated into a skincare routine, and other interactive Q&As. Give some thought as to how you can encourage insightful conversations between your followers in the comments to drive your exposure for your video content!
INCREMENTAL NEW FOLLOWERS
In our reference post, we see that this one single post drove 148 new followers to our account. For one of our client accounts, one viral post boosted our following from 25 to over 500 followers overnight — that’s the power of great content.
What you should do is analyze which post types, photos or video styles drive the highest number of new incremental followers.
POST SHARES
Imagine if on average your followers each have 100 followers of their own. When someone shares your post from Little Red Book, they could be sharing it with their friends on the platform OR on other Chinese social media platforms like WeChat, QQ or Weibo. This could drive exponential awareness for your content and for your account, so we love seeing a high number here because it spreads the impact of the post beyond just Little Red Book.
TRAFFIC SOURCE
You can also see where people saw your post, so you can see whether the algorithm saw enough promise in your content to promote it on the explore page. In this case, most of the traffic for this video came from the explore page.
If you use the right hashtags and keywords in your content, the search page could also be a great source of traffic for your content.
This chart shows the traffic sources for the post. From the top to bottom, over 90% of views came from the ‘explore page’, then the ‘follow page’, ‘profile’, ‘search’, and ‘other’. This shows that the algorithm thought the post would perform well and so promoted it on the explore page.
DEMOGRAPHIC INSIGHTS AND INTEREST CATEGORIES
You can view the demographic insights for EACH POST, which is great insight, especially if you are collaborating with a brand. You can show the brand whether your brand hit the right target audience, from the target age group to their interests.
For each post you can see the demographic insights that show you the gender, age, and geographic breakdown. For this post, the top 3 location were Vancouver, Richmond, and Burnaby. This allows me to show the brands I’m collaborating with that the traffic is relevant to their region.
You can also see the breakdown of the interests categories of your post viewers for each post. For example, the top 2 interests for this post’s viewers were travel and food. Since I’m promoting a cafe in this post, it can be said that travellers have now saved it on their bucket list, and locals have saved it to their list of cafes to try.
The best thing about the post performance section is that it shows you your performance relative to other content creators who are registered in the same category. For example, I am a verified food content creator, and my engagement on this reference post is higher than 89% of similar content. In terms of the incremental number of new followers generated by this single post, this post also performed 87% better than other content in the same category. This makes reporting on performance easier because now we have a relative benchmark to point to.
If you are a brand or Content Creator looking to improve your performance on Little Red Book, make sure to bookmark this blog post so you can come back to it later!
Looking to bring on a team to help manage your brand presence on Little Red Book? Our team of Chinese Marketing Specialists is happy to help! Contact us today at info@catalystagents.com to schedule a call!