Life-sharing Platform Xiaohongshu Releases Community Guidelines for Businesses

With a growing number of businesses joining the platform, Xiaohongshu, a life-sharing platform in China, released on Friday a set of Community Guidelines for Businesses, setting out a code of conduct for merchants and brands to keep the platform an authentic space with transparent engagement.

Zhu Bin, Xiaohongshu’s Head of Community Operations, spoke about the company’s efforts to improve the platform, “Hundreds of millions of users are sharing and discovering life experiences and lifestyles through Xiaohongshu, which has also inspired a group of creative and product-focused merchants and brands. As the number of businesses in the community continues to grow, we hope to empower them to create greater value for users by laying out principles for how they should operate within Xiaohongshu’s authentic atmosphere and build user trust.”

With Shanghai-based Xiaohongshu increasingly becoming a source of information for users doing their research as they seek to make informed lifestyle and consumption decisions, users with strong commercial intent are gathering on the platform. As a result, there is a large number of posts on Xiaohongshu with the keywords “how to buy” / “is it good” / “is it worth buying” / “what to do”. Information on products and services is very popular among users and they are likely to rely on this information to guide them in making consumption decisions.

In turn, this has attracted a growing presence of businesses on the platform as they seek to connect with these users. Currently, there are 130,000 brands listed on Xiaohongshu from more than 200 countries and regions around the world.

For the first time ever, Xiaohongshu’s Community Guidelines targeted at businesses lays out principles for how businesses should operate within the platform’s atmosphere and build user trust. The guidelines are intended to help enable businesses and consumers to connect through a set framework that clearly states the ground rules and reinforces transparency within the community.

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As Xiaohongshu seeks to keep a trusted space for users, the Community Guidelines for Businesses also serve the purpose of making it clear which posts are not allowed and the reasons for why certain posts are removed. The guidelines clearly oppose false marketing and the use of fear-based clickbait tactics to gain user traffic, seeking instead to empower the growth of merchants and brands that are committed to connecting with users through creating original content and winning over their trust.