With the recent concerns over a potential TikTok ban, many users have started migrating to RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu—a popular Chinese app that's gaining global traction. Much like TikTok, Rednote provides new creators with the opportunity to achieve explosive traffic growth, making it an excellent platform for blogging and earning affiliate income. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the algorithm that powers Rednote and how creators can leverage it to maximize their reach and impact.

To effectively promote on Rednote, it's essential to understand the platform's basic traffic logic. Knowing where your content will be visible to your audience is key to successful marketing.

Rednote's recommendation rules revolve around two core points: content tag matching and social relationship chain recommendations.

For example, if you often read weight-loss-related articles, the platform will recommend more notes on weight loss to you. After your notes are pushed to followers, Rednote evaluates them based on followers’ actions like likes, saves, comments, shares, and follows, assigning an internal score to the note. This score determines whether the note should be recommended to a wider audience. This scoring system is internally referred to as CES (Community Engagement Score).

High-scoring notes can also benefit from traffic support within Rednote and through Baidu search. This type of traffic has strong sustainability; your note could continue receiving likes, comments, and saves even years after posting.

However, for your notes to be recommended and gain more visibility, they must first be indexed by the system. So how does the system's recommendation algorithm work? Let me break it down for you.

Algorithm-Based Recommendations

• Content matching by user preferences (search keywords): The system recommends relevant content based on the user’s interests to encourage more saves.
• Extended reading recommendations: The platform suggests content related to what users have browsed, encouraging further reading and increasing interactions like likes, saves, and shares.
• Friend-based recommendations: Content from accounts users actively follow is displayed in a feed similar to a social media timeline.
• Location-based nearby recommendations: Users are shown notes from within a 20 km radius.
• Editorial recommendations: Rednote has official accounts that curate and promote high-quality user-generated notes.

As long as you consistently produce valuable content and publish high-quality notes, you can gain visibility and traffic even without an existing follower base, eventually attracting more followers in the process.

Note Weighting Algorithm

Apart from the content itself, the account's weight is also crucial. Once your account gains a certain number of followers, your notes will be recommended to them. If your followers like the note, it will further reach their friends, creating viral growth. Rednote's note ranking rules can be summarized in the following seven points:

1. Originality When writing notes, it's recommended to make the content as rich and detailed as possible. The system compares your content and images to existing ones, and overlapping content can lower your weight. A more detailed note reduces the overlap rate significantly.
   
   
2. Compliance with Platform Rules Notes deemed to violate rules or involve plagiarism will face traffic restrictions and lose exposure. The platform uses both machine and human reviews, so ensure your content avoids violations and prohibited terms.
   
   
3. Engagement Rate Likes, saves, shares, and comments all contribute to a higher engagement rate, which increases your note's visibility.
   
   
4. Tags Make use of the tagging feature. Adding tags to your images and content can enhance your note's weight.
   
   
5. Topics Many users browse content under popular topics. Including relevant topics in your notes boosts exposure and note weight.
   
   
6. Keywords Incorporate keywords into the title and ensure they appear about three times in the note content. The relevance between your note and the keywords significantly increases its weight. However, avoid keyword stuffing, as this can be flagged as clickbait and result in a penalty.
   
   
7. Text Length Notes with minimal text often appear as low-quality content. While the maximum note length is 1,000 words, aim for 400-600 words. The content should provide value to leverage the weight attributed to text length.
   
   

Rednote's Weight on Different Accounts

After Rednote's relaunch, stricter measures have been taken against marketing accounts, leading to adjustments in the account weighting mechanism. Accounts with lower weight will have their notes recommended to smaller traffic pools.

1. New Accounts Have Low Weight Newly registered accounts have lower weight. Posting notes immediately after registration may raise red flags, as it suggests the account might be a marketing tool. Therefore, new accounts need a "nurturing" period, during which regular activity will gradually increase their weight.
2. Violations Lead to Weight Reduction Violations, such as inappropriate personal profiles, note content, or comments, will lower account weight, affecting note recommendations and rankings.
3. Weight is Supported by Multiple Metrics Metrics such as account registration duration, level, number of followers, number of notes, likes, and saves all contribute to account weight. Optimizing these metrics can improve your account’s performance.
4. Weighted Accounts Certain accounts, such as those of celebrities or influencers invited by the platform, are given additional weight. These accounts, along with those of partner agencies, have an advantage. When benchmarking, avoid comparing your account to these "enhanced" accounts unless you fall into the same category.

Rednote's Recommendation Algorithm

Rednote's recommendation mechanism is similar to other platforms, with one unique difference: before a note can be recommended, it must go through a collection phase. If a note is not collected into the system, it will not enter the recommendation pool. To check whether a note has been collected, simply search for it. If it appears in the search results, it has been collected; otherwise, it has not.

Once a note is collected, it enters the system's recommendation pool. Initially, the note is placed in the first-level traffic pool, receiving approximately 200 impressions. If the note performs well in terms of click-through rate, likes, saves, and comments, meeting the criteria for advancing to the next level, the system will automatically push it to the second-level traffic pool, which offers around 2,000 impressions. This process continues through subsequent levels. However, if the note's metrics do not meet the requirements for advancing, the recommendation will stop.

Additionally, if a note is reported during the recommendation period, its exposure will decrease. This explains why some notes that were performing well suddenly stop gaining views—they may have been reported.

To learn more on how to grow your Rednote account with more followers, read the Rednote's complete guide part 2.