What I've learned to create my community on Xiaohongshu

I signed up on Xiaohongshu on January 13 before TikTok ban was supposed to happen. I taught myself a brief intro in Mandarin, posted it along with three other older videos I had recorded for American platforms with added subtitles, and things skyrocketed from there.

For anyone struggling to gain traction, this is what I've learned so far:

1. There's some luck involved. Other larger creators have mentioned this in interviews or in their own videos, and I believe this now because on US platforms I've barely managed to claw my way up to 15K followers combined between YouTube, Meta, and TikTok (where my largest US following is at 10.9K). Eventually, you post that one video that goes viral and you have to take full advantage of the momentum from there. For me, it just happened to have occurred on Xiaohongshu.

2. Read the room. Every social media platform has its own culture. As many others have noted, for Americans, Xiaohongshu is like a mix of Instagram and Pinterest, and is also used as a search engine. So people are looking to learn something from your content, whether it's about your lifestyle, culture, or hobby. Post with the intention of giving your fans some educational value based the focus of your content.

3. Be genuine. This should go without saying. Relax and be yourself. Don't worry about what other people think. There's an audience out there for everyone.

4. Content quality. A number of comments about my videos have been about the quality, presumably from both an educational and production perspective. I use a cinematic style of shooting, so I take advantage of natural light as much as I possibly can. I seldom use studio/auxiliary lighting. I don't use a teleprompter, either. I take bullet notes of the main points I wanna talk about and I wing it from there, so the dialogue is more authentic.

To be fair, I used to be in a public speaking club so that's helped me be quick on my feet with improvising dialogue. Also, one piece of advice that I learned from a YouTuber that has helped me do way less takes--when you record, pretend you're live, because when you're live, you have to keep going and you don't get to start over. This has helped me be more natural with my dialogue.

What I personally emphasize almost as much as the video audio, so I invested in a wireless lav mic for dialogue and a shotgun mic to capture environmental sounds for my b-roll footage. I use licensed music from a subscription service for my background music.

5. English speakers: Speak clearly, concisely, and caption your videos! Many of my fans have admitted they follow me to practice their English, so I've learned to speak more clearly and steadily. Avoid using filler words to collect your thoughts like "um", "uh", "like", and "you know". "So" and "and" can also be filler words if you're using them to collect your thoughts.

Speaking clear and grammatically correct English will make captions so much easier. Avoid slang, because it doesn't translate well. Caption your videos in English and simplified Chinese. I use CapCut Pro for this. I believe Adobe Premiere already offers this, as well as Final Cut Pro (but will require a Mac with Apple silicon). For my video titles and descriptions, I use ChatGPT or DeepSeek to translate.

For English speakers, it's more work to create content for Xiaohongshu, but for me it's been well worth the extra effort, and I hope it works for you, too. Please note that I still have much more to learn. I've been creating content occasionally since 2020, but I really started paying attention to details after my completely unexpected engagement on Xiaohongshu. I hope my experience so far helps some of you continue to create for this amazing community.