Little Red Book or 'Xiǎo Hóng Shū 小红书', or just 'RED' by people in the west, is often referred to as 'Chinese Instagram' and is now one of the most popular social media platforms for Mainland Chinese with over 100 million users. The users are mostly from the younger crowd, especially women.
This is an amazing opportunity for hotels outside of China who are targeting the Chinese market, to woo them with stunning shots of your hotel, pool and rooftop views - shots that will make them want to place themselves into those same shots and share them with their friends.
In this article, we will show you how Little Red Book can help boost your hotel to inbound Chinese tourists.
Step 1. How is Your Current RED Footprint?
It's important to understand your baseline. What do Chinese people see when they type in the name of your hotel - both for English and Chinese? This is the first impression of your hotel to potential customers who could be booking rooms with you and dining in your hotel restaurant outlets, so be sure to create a positive impact.
Step 2. RED SEO
Chinese people also use Little Red Book as search engine to look up travel and hotel information. You will want to use SEO to ensure that you are getting within the top 10 search terms in Chinese.
Step 3. Winning RED Strategies
There are a few strategies that you can use to get an edge on your competitors on RED.
Firstly, do a quick search to check the RED SEO word that you'd like to own.
In this example, let's say that word is 'xxxx'.
When looking at all the content posts that include your hotel and 'xxxx', if 10% of those content posts are from KOL's or normal users, it’s very likely that Little Red Book will prioritise your content into people's feeds. Depending on where you are, if there isn't a lot of competition in your country on RED, this can mean that your hotel will jump up in the rankings fast and you'll get a very noticeable spike in bookings.
As these are still early days, now is the time to jump in - don't wait, as this won't last forever. It certainly won't be this easy to achieve these sorts of results in the near future.
Step 4. RED Geo-Location Targeting is your Friend
You will want Chinese people to keep talking about you (only good comments of course), as this will help other Chinese travelers traveling around your country to see your hotel - their RED app feeds will be influenced by geo-targeting based on where they are. This is free marketing, so ... why not?
Hopefully this guide can get you started. It's important to remember that RED has a Chinese version especially for the domestic Mainland Chinese market and another international version. You will ideally want to be targeting both.