Your education brand may boast a great academic reputation, outstanding alumni, and a strong value proposition for international students; however, when reaching prospective Chinese students on Rednote (Xiaohongshu), the strategies that work for you on other platforms may fall flat here.
Those who have dabbled in publishing content on Rednote may have realized that some of your competitors—even those with less impressive academic offerings—are killing it with their target audiences. This is because they understand the culture and share authentic, relatable stories about their schools.
This is difficult for newcomers because Rednote isn’t just an Instagram clone—it’s a combination of Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok, with rules of engagement like none of the three.
Unlike your recruitment booklet that talks about every important fact about your institution, Rednote users crave authentic, experience-driven content that speaks directly to their concerns and dreams about studying abroad. They are also trendsetters and are always on the lookout for something new.
To solve this, we reverse-engineered some of the highest-ranking posts and studied 141 influencers in the foreign education niche on Rednote. By the end of this guide, you will have a data-driven way to convert Chinese users into applicants for your school. In addition to this, you will also
- understand the profile of students engaging with foreign education brands,
- know the best-performing content formats (spoiler: video content gets nearly double the reach of text/image posts),
- pick the best hashtags and engagement strategies that maximize post visibility, and
- learn how to use influencers to boost trust and reach your target audience quickly.
1. Aligning with Your Target Audience: Demographics and Interests of a Typical Student on Rednote
Who Is on Rednote
As discussed in our in-depth Rednote User Demographics Guide, more than 80% of the platform’s users are female. In the same research, we identified that the largest age group on the platform is between 18–24 years old, and many of these users come from the more affluent first-tier cities in China (Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Beijing, to name a few).
However, lower-ranking cities with sizable higher-middle-class populations are growing in their share of total users as well. ICEF Monitor reports that Swiss K-12 schools have seen an increase in students coming from places like Zhengzhou, which is undoubtedly a lower-ranking city among China’s mega-metropolises. These cities offer less overall competition and are seen as a growth market for many in the education industry. Moreover, most international schools in China are considered the first step in preparation for studying overseas and are also based in smaller cities.
All of these conditions make lower-tier cities more favorable for schools that are just entering the Chinese market.
Interests: What Does Your Audience Care About?
Did you know that on average, Chinese students and parents take 18 months to decide where to study overseas? During that time, both students and parents need many touchpoints with schools to decide which one to attend, and Rednote supports the decision-making process.
Many young people in the country use Rednote as a sort of “social Google” as they want human answers to very human questions. We analyzed hundreds of content pieces on the platform to identify what people want to know about studying in the UK. Here are some of them:
1. University & Academic Concerns
- What are the best and worst UK universities (university rankings, reputation, and tier lists)?
- Is a certain UK degree valuable, or is it “watered down” (学历水不水)?
- How competitive is X university in the UK?
- What’s waiting for me after graduation?
2. Cost of Studying & Living
- How much does it cost to study in the UK compared to other countries?
- How do different family incomes affect study abroad choices?
- How can I make money while studying in the UK?
- How do studying expenses in city X compare with those in city Y in the UK?
3. Accommodation & Daily Life
- How do I find housing in the UK?
- What is life like for a student in different UK cities?
- Where do most Chinese students live in cities like London, Manchester, Leeds, etc.?
- How does public transport work in the UK?
4. Visa & Work Opportunities
- What are the job prospects after graduation for international students?*
- How do I apply for a post-study work visa (PSW)?
- What are the difficulties in finding a job or internship as a Chinese student in the UK?
- What are the common career paths for Chinese students after graduating?
- How can I become a teacher or teaching assistant at a UK university?
* A huge concern in China right now due to increasing youth unemployment.
5. Cultural & Social Adjustments
- How do I make friends and socialize in the UK?
- Do most Chinese students only hang out with other Chinese students?
- What are the common personality traits of Chinese students in the UK?
- What are British students like?
6. Emergencies & Safety
- How do I handle medical emergencies in the UK?
- What should I do if I get scammed in the UK?
- How safe is the UK for international students?
- What are the common scams targeting international students?
Profile of an Overseas Study Candidate
Now that you know the demographics of your audience and what they care about (regarding UK study), how do you create content that directly speaks to them? Creating an ideal customer profile will help you never miss the mark when creating content on unfamiliar platforms.
Creating an ideal customer profile isn’t just about demographics (like the age and gender of your potential students), it’s about knowing what they care about, what are their biggest concerns, and what influences their decisions when it comes to making one of the most important decisions of their lives.
To better explain this, let’s take a look at a detailed profile of a prospective Chinese international student. Her profile is based on shared opinions among Chinese study-abroad students, Rednote’s user demographics, and key trends in China’s outbound education market.
Basic Information
- Name: Xiaoyu Li
- Age: Between 16–24 years old
- City/Province in China: Zhengzhou, Henan Province*
* A decisively Tier-2 city with 10 million urban inhabitants (although the government wants to market it as New Tier-1).
Educational Background
- Current school:
- Grade 10 at Sias International School
- IB school with around 300 students
- Preferred majors:
- Business administration
- Data science
- International relations
Study Abroad Plans
- Target countries:
- Primary: UK, US, Australia
- Secondary: Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong (due to affordability and proximity)
- Preferred universities:
- UK: University of Manchester, and UCL
- US: University of California system, and NYU
- Singapore: NUS, and SMU
Decision-Making Factors
- Top concerns:
- Safety and political stability (e.g., US-China tensions)
- Cost and financial burden
- Career opportunities and return on investment
- Social life and support, loneliness
- Key influences:
- Parents, decisions of peers, recruitment campaigns, QS Rankings
- Platforms where students share their experiences (like REDNote)
- Preferred sources of information:
- Short-video platforms (e.g., Rednote and Douyin)
- Personal insights from current and former students who studied abroad
- WeChat Official Accounts of universities
- Webinars and recruitment events from school representatives
Lifestyle & Interests
- Hobbies and extracurricular activities*
- Volunteering
- Sports
- Competitions
- Preferred way of consuming information:
- Trusts lived experiences more than marketing brochures
- Wants to listen to people who studied at the school or in the country
* These are often included in resumes and university applications.
Marketing Insights
- How they discovered your college/university:
- WeChat mini-program
- Attended a university-hosted event in Zhengzhou
- School counselor recommendation
- What they like/dislike about US universities:
- Likes: Top-tier education, diverse student body, and research opportunities
- Dislikes: Political instability, visa concerns, high costs
- Interest in student support services:
- Career counseling and job placement programs
- Scholarship and financial aid guidance
- Mental health and academic support services
2. Content Strategies for Engaging Chinese Students
Now that you know your target audience on Rednote and the type of answers they are looking for about your brand, how do you create content to engage them? In one word: authenticity.
Audiences are looking for more intimate and personal connections with brands on the app. So forget about complex infographics and polished articles that cram tons of text into a single image.
Your key to success on Rednote lies in your ability to show your school’s authentic self, which includes connecting young audiences in China with the people at your school. For many foreign schools, that includes
- Chinese-speaking foreign faculty members and students in your school,
- current and previous Chinese students of your school, and
- admissions officers, headmasters, deans, and other administrative staff.
Take one of our partners, Saint Mary’s, for example. Saint Mary’s is a girls’ boarding school in Raleigh, North Carolina, and one of the top posts (number of engagements) we created for them on Rednote is a collage of pictures showing the daily lives of the school’s students.
This post refrains from providing information already available in the school’s booklets and instead focuses on the transformation girls go through at the school; focusing on female empowerment, ingenuity, and the quality of the social life at St. Mary’s.
Another high-ranking post, or “note” as they are called the app, is a “day in the life” video featuring a South African student named Joan at the school. The comments on the video share people’s amazement about the small class sizes and the school’s beautiful campus; a clear contrast with Chinese high schools, which typically cram 30+ students into a single classroom.
As one comment puts it: “The dormitory is very nice. Most of the dormitories in Chinese schools are not as beautiful as this one.”
Videos Vs Image/Text Content on Rednote
You should also know that Rednote wasn’t originally a short-video platform like TikTok or Douyin, but they later added a similar algorithmic recommendation feature for short videos. To promote video content growth, Rednote works directly with brands and influencers to encourage more video sharing.
This focus on video is reflected in content performance data. Our analysis of top influencers in the foreign education niche revealed that whereas text/image posts receive a median of 458 views, videos generate 898 views on average—nearly double the reach. This makes video content an essential part of any marketing strategy on the app.
There are also certain hashtags that the platform is promoting. Regularly communicating with Rednote account managers and joining their online workshops reveal such opportunities.
Official Campaigns, Hashtags, and Trends
To ensure the highest visibility for your posts, your posts should also use suitable hashtags. Although the platform doesn’t provide analytics data about the performance of hashtags apart from the number of associated posts, you can see a list of promoted hashtags (these are platform-wide and industry-agnostic), as well as related popular hashtags on the search results page.
Although more targeted keywords will surely bring in a more engaged audience, you can always find ways to use popular hashtags to your advantage. For example, OOTD (outfit of the day) is a popular hashtag for creators to funnel traffic to their niche. An OOTD video showing your students or faculty members getting ready for the day can funnel some of that traffic to your content.
Another example of such versatile hashtags is the Myers-Briggs Type Index (MBTI), a personality test that, in a way, acts as a substitute for astrology and fortune-telling for the otherwise very secular Gen Z in China. There’s no shortage of lists matching personality types with the kind of school they should be studying in overseas.
Since Rednote allows you to choose up to 10 hashtags per post, you can always test a mix of foreign education-related hashtags along with other popular hashtags on the platform. Just make sure you don’t end up on the bad side of the algorithm by placing too many unrelated hashtags on your posts.
Here are seven of the popular hashtags you can check out to find content inspiration for your next campaign:
- #留学生真实生活 (Real Life of International Students) – 165,000 reads
- #留学生没有眼泪 (International Students Don’t Have Tears, talking about their daily struggles) – 149,000 reads
- #留学生回国找工作 (International students finding jobs back home) – 25,100,000 reads (extremely popular topic)
- #留学生穿搭 (International Student Attire) – 120,000,000 reads (also hugely popular but attracts non-international students, similar to the “old money fashion” in the West)
- #留子做饭到底有多难吃 (How difficult it is to eat food cooked by overseas students) – 267,000 reads
- #诺丁汉大学认可度 (University of Nottingham Rankings, replace Nottingham with any other university) – 14,000 reads (a niche topic but highly targeted)
- #万物皆可MBTI (Everything can be MBTI) – 346,000 reads (a broad topic that should give you an idea about the type of tongue-in-cheek humor popular on Rednote)
Engagement Types: Likes, Collects, Comments, and Quizzes
Although likes and comments are the primary engagement methods on Rednote, the app offers more novel ways of engagement. “Collects,” for example, act similarly to Pinterest boards, and content with a long shelf-life that users may go back and read again usually receives a “collect.”
This shows how important it is to share practical information with people across your marketing funnel. While a more general shortlist, guide, or recommendation post can receive more likes and collects from a broader audience, you can also engage your fans with surveys and calls-to-action (CTA) to join livestreams.
For bottom-of-the-funnel followers ready to contact you, you can also add a free consultation button at the bottom left of your post.
But, keep in mind that more advanced engagement methods like the latter require you to apply for a professional account on Rednote, which unsurprisingly comes with red tape for foreign entities. We at Nanjing Marketing Group helped X number of education brands obtain Professional Accounts to unlock deeper forms of engagement and lead capture methods.
3. Influencers & Micro-influencers on Rednote
No social media campaign in China is complete without adding some influencer marketing into the content mix. In China, people often localize concepts to reflect regional differences, and the term “influencer” is no exception. There are two main terms used for influencers: key opinion leaders (KOLs) and key opinion consumers (KOCs).
KOLs typically refer to professional content creators with larger followings, while KOCs represent micro-influencers who often have smaller audiences but higher engagement and authenticity.
Using Rednote’s official influencer marketing platform, Dandelion (小红书蒲公英), Nanjing Marketing Group analyzed all 141 registered influencers in the foreign education niche regarding who they are, the size of their audiences, and the type of content they create for education brands.
Out of the 141 influencers that do sponsored posts related to foreign education marketing,
- 114 of them are female (80%), and
- 27 are male (20%), a figure that matches the overall demographic distribution of the Rednote platform.
The median reading rate (comparable to the click-through rate) across all influencers on the list is 637 per image post. However, the disparity in readership is very high. While some influencers have a median reading rate of 292,566, it can be as low as 23.
The median number of followers for these influencers is 6,305. Although a few outliers have hundreds of thousands of followers, almost 80% (117 out of 141) of the influencers in this list have a follower count between 1,000 and 36,000. We will consider the latter as KOCs, while anyone with a follower base of more than 36,000 will be considered a KOL.
Based on the very large spread in readership and followers, the only way to make a calculated decision about which type of influencer to work with is by separating these influencers into two categories: KOLs and KOCs.
Whereas the first group has a median engagement count of 413 per post, KOCs with smaller audiences typically have an engagement count of 27. KOLs have a median starting price of 700 USD per post, highlighting their higher market positioning, while KOCs typically ask for a more affordable rate of 55 USD.
Given these statistics, what kind of influencers should you work with on Rednote? Let’s say you’re trying to reach 10,000 people on the app.
- Work with a Famous KOL (Key Opinion Leader)
- Cost: 950 USD for 1.4 posts.
- Reach: Typically has a large following, around 60,000.
- Advantages:
- Offer high credibility due to the size of their audience.
- Require little coordination since a small number of large influencers are easier and more professional to work with.
- Typically have more content experience and can offer higher quality content that can be repurposed (with permission, of course).
- Work with multiple small KOCs (Key Opinion Consumers)
- Cost: 870 USD for 15.7 posts.
- Reach: Generally have a smaller follower base of around 4,500 but are seen as more relatable and authentic by their audience.
- Advantages:
- Lower risk of targeting the wrong crowd, since you get to try working with as many as 16 influencers.
- Ideal for a more grassroots marketing strategy that relies on niche audiences (e.g., girls’ boarding schools as opposed to the University of Oxford).
- Content is seen as more authentic and based on lived experience, rather than something choreographed and synthetic.
We recommend that smaller, more regional institutions take a varied approach by working with KOCs within their niche, while larger universities should target a mixture of both KOLs and KOCs in their influencer marketing campaigns.
You can always start by testing different content types with KOCs and then market the ones with more influential online personalities. Can’t find a suitable influencer to create content for your school? Don’t fret—at Nanjing Marketing Group, we can help you adapt some of your existing content for Chinese audiences.
4. Metrics for Success on Rednote
If your content is getting high exposure but isn’t being engaged with, you might have to rethink your CTAs and the questions you leave your customers with.
Rednote offers a mix of Pinterest-style post format with Reddit-style comments, so it’s crucial to give your audience a reason to talk with you. For example, the day-in-the-life-style posts I mentioned previously can include a CTA that asks users to share what their typical school day looks like or what their outfit of the day (OOTD) is for going to school.
With the influx of TikTok refugees making a home for themselves on the platform, the users of Rednote are more likely than ever to engage with foreigners.
Let’s talk about the analytics tools available to creators on Rednote. First of all, there’s the Post Performance Tab. This shows the impressions and the engagement each of your notes received. Second, you have your Audience Analysis. Here, you can view your follower acquisition rate as well as key markers about your fans:
- How they found your content (direct search, search results, from news feed)
- Gender of your audience
- Age (this should tell you whether you’re engaging mostly with parents or students)
- Primary interests
- Location (based on the Chinese city tier system)
Finally, you have access to profile page analytics:
- How many people visited your profile
- Visitors who became followers through your profile page
- Count and rate of post clicks on your profile page
Conclusion
Rednote is one of the most powerful platforms for engaging with prospective Chinese students. Unlike traditional marketing channels, where schools typically showcase their QS World Rankings and academic achievements, Rednote thrives on authentic, experience-driven conversations.
To succeed on Rednote, schools must answer students’ biggest questions about studying abroad, and the best way to do this is through video content. Instead of just sharing facts, showing real human experiences and what life is like at your school will have a much bigger impact. Videos consistently get double the reach of image or text posts, making them the most effective way to gain exposure and engagement. This means your students, faculty, and alumni can be your strongest marketing assets on Rednote.
For an even faster way to reach the right audience, consider partnering with influencers, and Rednote’s official influencer platform, Dandelion (蒲公英), can help you find the right creators. A mix of KOLs for established trust and KOCs for authenticity can make it much easier to build credibility and reach prospective students.
More than just a platform for awareness, Rednote is a powerful tool for conversion. Schools that embrace video-first, influencer-driven, and community-led strategies will stand out, build engagement, and ultimately turn their followers into applicants.
Ready to launch your Rednote marketing strategy and connect with prospective students more authentically? Start building your content presence on Rednote with Nanjing Marketing Group today!