Xiaohongshu Brand Benchmark Report: Compare Your Performance to Peers
Date Published
Table Of Contents
1. Why Benchmarking on Xiaohongshu Is Different
2. The Metrics That Actually Matter on XHS
3. Xiaohongshu Benchmark Data by Industry
1. What Top-Performing Brands Do Differently
2. How to Use Benchmark Data to Improve Your XHS Strategy
3. Tools for Tracking Your Xiaohongshu Performance
4. Final Thoughts: Benchmarks Are a Starting Point, Not a Finish Line
Your Xiaohongshu account has been live for months. You're posting consistently, working with KOLs, and seeing some engagement — but you have no idea whether your numbers are good, average, or quietly falling behind your competitors. That's the reality for most international brands on Xiaohongshu (also known as RedNote or Little Red Book): they're operating without a compass.
This benchmark report changes that. Drawing on the latest platform data across five of Xiaohongshu's highest-performing verticals — beauty, fashion, food and beverage, mother and baby, and travel — this guide gives you the reference points you need to evaluate your account honestly, identify where the gaps are, and understand what the top brands in your category are doing to stay ahead. Whether you're a new entrant or an established player looking to optimize, knowing where you stand relative to your peers is the first step toward sustainable growth on one of the world's most commercially powerful social commerce platforms.
Why Benchmarking on Xiaohongshu Is Different {#why-benchmarking}
Benchmarking on Xiaohongshu isn't simply a matter of copying the same KPI framework you use on Instagram or TikTok. The platform operates as a hybrid between a search engine, a social community, and an e-commerce marketplace — and that combination creates a performance environment with its own rules. <ref id="2-11,2-12">Xiaohongshu's distinctive ecosystem blends social media engagement with e-commerce functionality in ways that Western platforms don't, meaning traditional analytics frameworks often fall short when applied here.</ref>
The most important difference is the weight the platform places on saves (收藏). On Instagram, a like is the dominant signal. On Xiaohongshu, saves carry substantially more algorithmic authority. <ref id="2-19,2-20">When users bookmark content for future reference, it signals high value and intent — and saves are weighted heavily in Xiaohongshu's algorithm.</ref> A post with modest likes but strong save rates will consistently outperform a post with high likes and no saves, both in terms of organic distribution and downstream conversion. This shifts the benchmark conversation away from raw engagement counts and toward quality interaction signals.
Benchmarking is also complicated by the platform's CES (Clickthrough and Engagement Score) system. <ref id="11-17,11-18">Xiaohongshu uses a CES framework to evaluate content quality, applying a weighted score based on Likes (1 point), Collections (1 point), Comments (4 points), Shares (4 points), and Follows (8 points).</ref> This means two brands with the same total engagement number can have very different algorithmic standing depending on the type of engagement they're generating. Benchmarking purely by engagement rate without understanding this weighting can lead to false conclusions about performance.
Finally, benchmarks are category-specific. <ref id="17-8">Industry-specific benchmarks provide more relevant comparison points than overall platform averages.</ref> A beauty brand and a travel brand operate in very different engagement environments on Xiaohongshu — comparing across categories produces misleading insights. The only useful benchmark is one that reflects your own vertical.
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The Metrics That Actually Matter on XHS {#metrics-that-matter}
Before diving into the numbers, it's worth aligning on which metrics you should actually be tracking. Not all engagement signals are created equal on Xiaohongshu, and brands that optimize for the wrong indicators often find themselves with impressive-looking dashboards and disappointing business outcomes.
Engagement Rate is the foundational metric. The recommended formula for Xiaohongshu accounts for the platform's unique interaction types: <ref id="6-16,6-17">The conventional engagement rate formula (likes + comments / followers × 100) requires modification for Xiaohongshu. A more comprehensive approach uses: (likes + comments + collects + shares) / impressions × 100 — acknowledging the platform's unique 'collect' function as a stronger indicator of content value than likes alone.</ref> Using impressions rather than follower count in the denominator is also important, since Xiaohongshu's algorithm frequently distributes content to non-followers.
Save Rate is arguably the single most performance-predictive metric on the platform. <ref id="5-1">The 'save' function proves particularly valuable, with users bookmarking content for future reference at rates 3–5 times higher than shares, indicating strong purchase consideration and research behavior.</ref> Brands should track their save-to-impression ratio over time, as high save rates correlate with both algorithm favorability and longer content shelf-life.
Follower Growth Rate matters, but with an important caveat: raw follower growth without engagement growth is a warning sign, not a success metric. <ref id="4-14,4-15,4-16">Despite increased follower numbers and higher post volume, a decline in engagement-per-post shows that growth did not keep pace with audience quality. The influx of new followers who may be less engaged, combined with content saturation from increased posting, dilutes interactions per post — highlighting the importance of balancing reach with meaningful engagement.</ref>
For brands running paid activity or KOL campaigns, CPR (Cost Per Reach) and CPE (Cost Per Engagement) are the core efficiency metrics. <ref id="1-4">CPR evaluates the cost of effective exposure per post (target: below ¥1 is good, below ¥0.5 is excellent), while CPE assesses user interest and is considered the most valued metric by brands — a CPE below ¥10 is good, below ¥5 is excellent.</ref>
For e-commerce-integrated accounts, conversion-layer metrics matter just as much as engagement. <ref id="19-10">Xiaohongshu's shoppable posts (Goods Notes) demonstrate strong performance, with click-through rates to product pages averaging 2.5–4%, substantially higher than typical social commerce benchmarks.</ref>
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Xiaohongshu Benchmark Data by Industry {#benchmark-data}
The following benchmarks reflect current performance norms across Xiaohongshu's top verticals for brand accounts. These are intended as directional reference ranges, not fixed targets — your specific positioning, account maturity, and content quality will all influence where within these ranges you realistically land.
Beauty & Skincare {#beauty-skincare}
Beauty is Xiaohongshu's most mature and most competitive vertical. It is also the one where the platform's purchase-intent mechanics shine most clearly. <ref id="24-5">Beauty and cosmetics accounts for the highest engagement rates on the platform, ranging from 5–10%, with the strongest purchase intent correlation of any category.</ref> The trade-off is that competition is intense: <ref id="22-3">beauty and skincare is consistently the most competitive vertical on Xiaohongshu, with brands vying fiercely for the same core users and high purchase intent audience.</ref>
Key benchmarks for beauty brand accounts on Xiaohongshu:
• Engagement rate (brand account): 5–10% for established accounts; emerging brands with highly targeted content can exceed 8%
• KOL micro-influencer engagement rate (10K–100K followers): 5–8%
• KOL mid-tier engagement rate (100K–500K followers): 3–5%
• CTR for beauty ad content: 1.5–2.3%
• Conversion rate (content to purchase): 4–7%
The emotional drivers in beauty are also worth understanding. <ref id="30-12,30-13">Self-appreciation emotions in the beauty category reach 26.43% on Xiaohongshu, compared to the overall platform average of 10.27% — meaning the beauty sector generates 2.57 times more self-affirming emotional engagement than other verticals.</ref> Top-performing beauty brands have shifted their messaging from product efficacy to personal empowerment, reflecting this shift in audience motivation. For international brands entering this category, the implication is clear: content that celebrates the user, not the product, outperforms traditional promotional formats.
Fashion & Apparel {#fashion-apparel}
Fashion is Xiaohongshu's second-largest content category and one of its most save-driven verticals. Users curate style inspiration, save outfit ideas for future reference, and use the platform as a digital wardrobe planning tool — behaviors that generate high save rates but longer purchase consideration cycles. <ref id="24-5">Fashion and apparel accounts on Xiaohongshu are characterized by high save rates but longer consideration periods before purchase</ref>, which means success metrics look different here than in beauty.
Key benchmarks for fashion brand accounts:
• Engagement rate (brand account): 3–6% for established accounts
• Save rate: Among the highest of any category — benchmark your own posts against a 5–8% save-to-impression ratio
• KOL engagement rate benchmark: 3–5% for mid-tier collaborations
• CPC for fashion ads: RMB 6–15 per click, rising 30–50% during seasonal campaign peaks
<ref id="27-1">Research indicates that 86% of Xiaohongshu users have made purchases based on content they discovered on the platform, with fashion and beauty categories consistently ranking as the most active verticals.</ref> The format that consistently outperforms others in fashion? Realistic, person-led styling content. Outfit posts featuring real people rather than models, with specific occasion context — such as 'how I styled this for a summer wedding' — drive both saves and purchase intent far more effectively than polished editorial-style campaigns.
Food & Beverage {#food-beverage}
Food and beverage occupies a unique position on Xiaohongshu: it generates strong local discovery intent and drives significant offline foot traffic, but has lower average CPC and engagement rates than beauty or fashion. The platform is particularly effective for F&B brands at the awareness and consideration stages — users actively discover new restaurants, imported products, and specialty ingredients through the platform's search function. <ref id="11-1">Nearly 70% of monthly active users have search behavior on Xiaohongshu, with one-third going straight to searching as their first action upon opening the app</ref> — a user behavior that benefits any brand where product discovery is search-driven.
Key benchmarks for F&B brand accounts:
• Engagement rate (brand account): 3–5% average
• CPC for F&B ads: RMB 4–10 per click (lower than beauty/fashion, often used for awareness objectives)
• Premium subcategory CPM: Imported specialty foods (¥70–90), premium tea and coffee (¥60–85), health-focused nutrition (¥65–95)
• Content-to-purchase path: Typically longer; offline conversion is a significant but harder-to-measure outcome
For imported and specialty F&B brands, Xiaohongshu's country-of-origin credibility effect is particularly powerful. <ref id="18-27">Products positioned as 'premium imported' or carrying strong country-of-origin credentials outperform generic international brands</ref>, and content that tells the story behind the product — origin, production method, the people involved — consistently generates higher save rates than pure product showcase posts.
Mother & Baby {#mother-baby}
The mother and baby category on Xiaohongshu is a high-intent vertical with some of the most engaged community behavior on the platform. Parents come to the platform specifically to seek trusted advice, compare products, and share experiences — behaviors that generate substantive comments and strong save rates. <ref id="24-5">Mother and baby is characterized by high commercial intent and strong community discussion engagement on Xiaohongshu.</ref>
Key benchmarks for mother & baby brand accounts:
• Engagement rate: 4–7%, with comment rates above the platform average due to discussion-driven content
• Save rate: High — users bookmark product recommendations, milestone guides, and developmental tips for repeated reference
• Conversion signals: Strong; the purchase funnel is short once trust is established
• KOC (Key Opinion Consumer) effectiveness: Higher than most categories — peer-review content from real parents significantly outperforms polished brand content
Authenticity is non-negotiable in this vertical. <ref id="23-21,23-22">On Xiaohongshu, parents are not just scrolling — they are searching for trusted advice, shared experiences, and solutions for everyday challenges.</ref> Brands that lead with transparent product information, honest comparisons, and real-parent testimonials consistently outperform those using traditional advertising formats. A well-executed KOC seeding campaign in this category, where real parents document their genuine experience with a product, can drive significantly better engagement than a high-budget KOL partnership.
Travel & Lifestyle {#travel-lifestyle}
Travel is where some of the most detailed benchmark data exists for Xiaohongshu, partly because several research organizations have tracked international travel brand performance over multiple years. The headline finding from recent data is important: <ref id="4-5,4-6">a significant year-on-year decline in ERPF (Engagement Rate per Post per Follower) has occurred across all travel categories, despite increased follower counts and higher posting volumes — suggesting that content saturation and less-engaged new followers have diluted interactions per post.</ref>
Key benchmarks for travel brand accounts:
• Overall engagement rate: 6–10% for destination-focused content and travel experiences
• ERPF by category (Q4 2024): NTOs 0.0425%, DMOs 0.0302%, Airlines 0.0523%, Cruise Lines 0.0351%, Hotels 0.0208%, Attractions & Museums 0.0215%
• Year-on-year ERPF trend: Declining across all subcategories — NTOs saw the most moderate decline (–16%) while Attractions & Museums experienced the steepest drop (–75%)
• Top content drivers: Celebrity-driven content, giveaways, storytelling-led short documentaries, and viral visual posts
The travel benchmark data reveals a critical strategic lesson that applies across all verticals: <ref id="4-7,4-8">leading brands maintained strong engagement through viral posts, celebrity-driven content, giveaways, and storytelling strategies — emphasizing the need for high-quality, interactive content to sustain engagement alongside audience growth.</ref> Posting volume alone does not protect engagement rates. Quality and strategic content planning are what separate category leaders from the rest.
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What Top-Performing Brands Do Differently {#top-performers}
Across all verticals, the brands that consistently outperform benchmarks share a set of behavioral patterns that go beyond content quality alone. Understanding these patterns is arguably more valuable than the benchmark numbers themselves.
They treat saves as their primary KPI. Top-performing accounts actively engineer their content to earn saves — creating posts with reference value (how-to guides, product comparisons, ingredient breakdowns, itineraries) rather than purely entertainment value. <ref id="18-6,18-7,18-8">Saves are the strongest engagement signal on Xiaohongshu, signaling genuine utility value from users. Content optimized for saves — how-to guides, product comparisons, ingredient breakdowns, 'hidden gems' recommendations — consistently outperforms content optimized for likes.</ref>
They prioritize authenticity over polish. This is the single most consistent finding across every research source and case study: <ref id="11-5,11-6">real photos, personal experiences, unfiltered before-and-after comparisons, and honest reviews outperform polished brand copy every time — because 82% of Chinese consumers prefer social media for researching and verifying new products, and they're on Xiaohongshu specifically because they trust peer voices over advertising.</ref>
They maintain account consistency and focus. <ref id="11-26,11-27">Account history matters significantly on Xiaohongshu. A vertically focused account that has posted consistently in one category, maintained clean compliance, and built genuine followers starts each new post with a higher baseline algorithmic weight.</ref> Brands that treat XHS as a broadcast channel for repurposed content from other platforms consistently underperform compared to those that build a dedicated, category-focused presence.
They balance KOL reach with KOC depth. Micro-influencer content (10,000–100,000 followers) consistently delivers stronger engagement rates than macro-KOL content in most categories. <ref id="24-12">Posts from micro-influencers generate average engagement rates of 5–12% and drive purchase consideration among 35–45% of engaged users.</ref> The most effective brands pair macro-KOL campaigns for awareness with KOC seeding for grassroots trust-building — a layered approach that serves both the algorithm and the customer journey.
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How to Use Benchmark Data to Improve Your XHS Strategy {#use-benchmarks}
Benchmark data is only useful if you translate it into decisions. Here is a practical framework for doing that:
1. Establish your baseline. Pull your last 30–60 days of performance data from your Xiaohongshu business account. Calculate your average engagement rate using the platform-appropriate formula (likes + comments + collects + shares / impressions × 100), your average save rate, and your follower growth rate. This becomes your personal benchmark.
1. Compare against your vertical, not the platform average. Use the category benchmarks in this report to identify where you sit — below, at, or above average for your industry. <ref id="16-4,16-5">Establishing performance context by benchmarking your metrics against competitors and category leaders within your niche reveals whether performance gaps stem from execution issues or simply reflect category-specific norms.</ref>
1. Diagnose the gap. If your engagement rate is below benchmark, the root cause is usually one of three things: content format mismatch (not producing what the algorithm rewards in your category), audience quality issues (follower base is not genuinely aligned with your content), or posting frequency problems (either too infrequent to build momentum or too frequent and creating saturation). <ref id="16-6,16-7">If leading competitors consistently achieve 8–10% engagement rates while your content hovers around 2–3%, significant optimization opportunities exist. Conversely, if your performance aligns with or exceeds category benchmarks, focus on scaling successful tactics rather than dramatic strategic shifts.</ref>
1. Audit your top competitors. <ref id="33-16,33-17">Identify 5–8 direct competitors and track their key metrics monthly, including posting frequency, average engagement rates, content themes, and apparent partnership strategies. While Xiaohongshu doesn't provide direct access to competitor analytics, manual tracking of publicly visible metrics combined with third-party monitoring tools builds a comprehensive competitive intelligence database.</ref>
1. Run content experiments aligned to benchmark gaps. If your save rate is below the category average, run a structured test of save-optimized content (reference posts, guides, comparison content) over four weeks and measure the impact. If your comment rate lags, test content formats that invite discussion — questions, polls, and opinion-seeking posts typically drive comment volume above platform averages.
For brands that want deeper support building this kind of structured benchmarking and optimization process, AllXHS offers industry-specific Xiaohongshu marketing strategies across 20+ verticals, including ready-to-use performance frameworks tailored to each category's unique dynamics.
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Tools for Tracking Your Xiaohongshu Performance {#tracking-tools}
You cannot benchmark what you cannot measure. Here are the primary tools available for tracking your Xiaohongshu account performance:
Xiaohongshu's Native Analytics (Professional Account Dashboard)
<ref id="32-1,32-2,32-3">Xiaohongshu's business accounts provide basic analytics including content performance data on views, engagement, and follower growth, audience demographics by age, location, and interests, and analysis of which posts generate the most engagement.</ref> This is the starting point for any benchmarking effort. The limitation is that native analytics lack advanced attribution capabilities and cross-platform integration — they tell you what happened, but not always why.
Creator Centre
<ref id="37-5,37-6">The Creator Centre is Xiaohongshu's official integrated tool that helps brands track account performance and provides valuable analytics, including engagement rates, follower growth, and more.</ref> It also includes content creation guidance and platform-specific best practices.
XinHong Data (新红数据)
<ref id="37-14,37-15,37-16">XinHong Data is a third-party analytics tool owned by Newrank China, specifically designed for the Xiaohongshu platform and verified as an official platform partner. It serves as a one-stop data shop offering deeper insights than the Creator Centre to help brands optimize their content.</ref> Key features include real-time trending keyword tracking, performance metrics for specific accounts, and industry-level trend reports. Pricing starts at 799 RMB per month.
Social Listening Tools
<ref id="32-5">Platforms like KAWO, WalktheChat, and Mailman Group's tools provide deeper Xiaohongshu insights</ref> beyond what native analytics surface, including brand mention monitoring, sentiment tracking, and competitive benchmarking across accounts.
For brands managing complex multi-channel strategies, <ref id="40-3">advanced businesses complement platform-native analytics with AI marketing tools that aggregate cross-platform data, sentiment analysis of comments and mentions, competitor benchmarking, and attribution modeling that weighs Xiaohongshu's role in multi-touchpoint customer journeys.</ref>
AllXHS's suite of free Xiaohongshu resources includes 25+ ready-to-use tools and templates specifically designed to help international brands set up, track, and optimize their performance on the platform — without needing to build custom analytics infrastructure from scratch.
Final Thoughts: Benchmarks Are a Starting Point, Not a Finish Line {#final-thoughts}
Knowing where you stand is valuable. Knowing what to do next is what actually moves the needle.
The benchmark data in this report gives you an honest picture of what good, average, and underperforming look like across Xiaohongshu's top verticals. But the brands that consistently lead their categories on the platform share something benchmarks alone cannot capture: they understand the why behind the numbers. They know that saves signal purchase intent, that authentic peer-voice content earns algorithmic favor, and that account consistency compounds over time in ways that burst campaigns never can.
For international brands navigating this platform, the gap between understanding these principles and executing them fluently is where most of the real challenge lives. Cultural nuance, content localization, influencer selection, and platform-specific strategy — these are not areas where generic frameworks from Western markets transfer cleanly.
That's exactly what AllXHS is built to solve. As the #1 English-language resource hub for international brands marketing on Xiaohongshu, AllXHS offers over 378 data-driven industry reports, a 21-module training academy, and 25+ tools and templates spanning 20+ verticals — all purpose-built to help brands like yours close the performance gap and build sustainable growth on this platform. Whether you're looking for industry-specific Xiaohongshu marketing strategies, expert marketing services, or simply want to explore what's available, start with our free Xiaohongshu resources library.
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