品牌如何在小红书（XHS）赢得新加坡与马来西亚消费者

Chances are you’ve heard of XHS. In Singapore, it’s probably already on your phone. Open it and it looks familiar: A feed of photos and short videos, a bit like Instagram. But it isn’t the same, which is exactly why brands should take it seriously, and why many get it wrong.

So, what makes XHS different?

Xiaohongshu, or XHS (known internationally as RedNote), has all the likes, follows and endless scrolling of social media, but people use it like a search engine. They post ‘notes’: Honest reviews, practical guides and itineraries planned down to the kopi stop. Everyone else searches, saves and grills them before spending a cent.

If WeChat is for chatting with people you know and Weibo is for catching the news, XHS is for deciding. Still blur? Let’s take it to the kopitiam, Singapore’s traditional neighbourhood coffee shop, where the best explanations happen.

If social platforms were people at the kopitiam, Facebook is the uncle you keep catching up with, even though neither of you remembers why. Instagram is the stylish friend whose weekend always looks better than yours. TikTok is the funny stranger who keeps ordering another round of teh tarik (pulled milk tea). XHS is the friend you ask before spending money: Honest advice, real photos, receipts included.

Why Singapore and Malaysia are different

Here, the audience is bigger than most brands assume, because it includes local Chinese-speaking consumers.

Chinese residents make up 73.9 per cent of Singapore’s resident population, according to the Department of Statistics Singapore. In Malaysia, the Chinese community accounts for 22.2 per cent of citizens, nearly seven million people, according to the Department of Statistics Malaysia. XHS’s own data counted more than 2.5 million Malaysian users in 2023, making it the platform’s second-largest market outside mainland China after Taiwan, as reported by Malay Mail. In Singapore, younger Chinese Singaporeans are, in our experience, among its most active users.

Then add the visitors. Mainland China was Singapore’s top source market in 2025, with 3.1 million arrivals and S$3.68 billion in tourism receipts in the first nine months alone, according to the Singapore Tourism Board.

One platform, three audiences. But they don’t all speak the same Chinese, which matters more than brands realise.

It’s not Instagram with Chinese captions

On Meta and TikTok, comments are sparse, ads are polished and every journey ends at a “Shop now” button. XHS users ask questions in the comments, slide into your DMs and trust content that looks real over content that looks expensive.

So the job shifts from announcing to answering. Instagram says “Our new collection has arrived.” XHS asks, “Okay, but which mobile plan is actually best for students?”

Getting started: Think like a search engine

People search XHS like Google, so start with questions, not campaigns. Map every way people search your category, nail the big questions, answer the ones competitors missed, and get in early on rising terms.

Paid media flips too: start precise, then scale out behind notes people already save.

Strategy first, pretty pictures later

Anyone can translate a caption or make a nice graphic. What wins on XHS is reading the culture: What people search, what they save and what they’d never ask at the counter. That’s the thinking behind our XHS work with FairPrice Group, Singapore’s largest retailer.

The pork-cut cheat sheet: Pork cuts go by different names depending on where you grew up. For Mainland Chinese shoppers in Singapore, the terms they use back home don’t always match what’s on the label. Same language, different everyday vocabulary. XHS users live for practical guides (攻略) they bookmark and pull out mid-errand. So we built one: A bilingual pork-cut guide that links each label to the name shoppers already know. Useful, saveable and localised in experience, not just language.

The office warrior play: XHS loves a joke about the overworked office warrior (打工人), so we spoke straight to them with an overnight oats “lifesaver for busy workers” recipe in a simple guide format. It earned 1,453 saves against 1,591 likes, all from organic traffic. Likes measure attention. Saves mean the content has become a reference people plan to come back to.

The group chat move: XHS users smell a hard sell a mile away. So we invited followers into group chats for deals and a direct line to the brand, keeping the feed useful.

None of this was about prettier posts, or about translating content made for other platforms. It was about understanding how Chinese-speaking shoppers search, ask questions and decide what to buy, then fitting the brand into how XHS already thinks.

The short version

The three shifts are from broadcast to search, from selling to solving, and from reach to trust.

On XHS, nobody saves the brand that shouted loudest. They save the one that answered their question. Be that brand, the friend at the kopitiam table worth asking, and you won’t need to chase customers. They’ll come looking for you.

About the author: Jeffrey Hau is CEO of Prizm Group, a digital marketing agency specialising in RedNote, CRM and digital marketing strategy, operating across Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

• Learn more at prizmgroup.com.sg.

The post Less shouting, more answering: How brands win on XHS appeared first on Inside Retail Asia.