Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) advertising works for UAE businesses when the ads push posts Chinese buyers already trust: creator content first, feed and search ads behind it, and every lead captured through the app's own tools. An investor in Hangzhou searches Xiaohongshu for Dubai company setup, scrolls past two ads and saves a post from a founder who moved last year. That post did more selling than either ad.
To see why, you need to know how Xiaohongshu works, because it behaves like no social platform a UAE marketing team already runs. This guide starts there, then covers the ad tools, what they cost, how to open an account and how to turn interest into leads.
Xiaohongshu is a Chinese app where people share and search first-hand reviews of the things they are deciding on, from travel and education to investment and choosing an adviser. Its name, 小红书, means Little Red Book, and English speakers have also known it as RedNote since it topped the US App Store in January 2025.
It works like a search engine filled with reviews written by ordinary users. More than 70% of its monthly users search inside the app, and advertising made up 76% of its 2025 revenue, so the platform is built to sell ads. What decides whether those ads work is the thing people come to read: the note.
A note (笔记) is the basic post on Xiaohongshu: a set of photos or a short video with a long caption, usually written as a personal review or guide. A founder's note on moving a company to Dubai might walk through the free zone she chose, what the licence cost, how long the visas took and what she would do differently.
Notes behave more like reviews than social posts. People search for them by topic, save them to come back to, and use the comments to ask follow-up questions, so a useful note keeps turning up long after it is posted. That is the first of several ways Little Red Book differs from the platforms your team already knows.
Little Red Book is built for searching and saving, where Instagram and TikTok are built for scrolling. Three differences change how a business should use it.
Those three differences shape how advertising works on Xiaohongshu, and why so many brands that are good at Instagram get it wrong.
Xiaohongshu sells advertising through three tools: Juguang (聚光) for feed and search ads, Pugongying (蒲公英) for paid creator collaborations, and Shutiao (薯条) for small boosts of single notes.
| Tool | What it does | Where a UAE business uses it |
|---|---|---|
| Juguang (聚光) | In-feed ads and search ads, Xiaohongshu's main ad platform | Putting your best notes in front of the right audience, and showing up when buyers search your category |
| Pugongying (蒲公英) | The official marketplace for briefing and paying creators | Every paid creator note, so it is declared and can be boosted |
| Shutiao (薯条) | A self-serve boost for one note, from 75 yuan | Testing which notes deserve a real budget |
Every one of these ads is a note. A feed ad is a note shown to the audience you pick, marked as sponsored. A search ad is a note placed in the results when someone types your category. A creator collaboration is a note written by someone with a following of their own. So users judge an ad the way they judge any other note: is it useful, and does the writer sound like someone who knows?
A Little Red Book ad works when the note inside it would be worth reading without the ad. That usually means a creator's note, or a brand note written the way a creator would write it, with the ad spend putting it in front of the right people.
Xiaohongshu's own model for this is called KFS: creator notes, feed ads and search ads, run as one plan. Creators make the notes people trust. Feed ads take the best of them to the investors, students or travellers you want, and search ads put them near the top when those people type your category.
The order matters, because only notes filed through Pugongying can be boosted through Juguang. Pay a creator off-platform and you get a note you can never put money behind.
We saw this on the China roadshows we ran for our client DMCC. The first Little Red Book campaign brought in leads more cheaply than any other advertising channel DMCC was running. When Xiaohongshu became the lead channel in July 2024, registrations from it rose 150% on the previous event, its ads drove 29% of all registrations, and cost per lead fell 37%.
The ads worked because there was something worth clicking through to: notes planned for Little Red Book and written in its style. That content work is also where most of a campaign's budget goes.
Little Red Book publishes no rate card: no minimum deposit, no average cost per click and no average cost per lead. What you can plan around is below.
| Cost | What to expect |
|---|---|
| Professional account verification | 600 yuan a year |
| Shutiao boost | From 75 yuan per note |
| Small creators (1,000 to 50,000 followers) | About 500 to 3,000 yuan a post, agency benchmark |
| Large creators (50,000 followers and up) | From about 10,000 yuan to well over 100,000 yuan a post, agency benchmark |
| Juguang ad spend | Prepaid through your agency, which sets its own first top-up |
The account fees are small. The real budget goes on creators and content, and the ad spend multiplies whatever they make. Small creators are the cheapest way to fill the search results with real reviews, and one or two larger names add reach and credibility on top. Since the platform publishes no cost-per-lead figure, treat any agency that guarantees one before it has seen your category with some suspicion.
If you want a budget built around your category and your buyers, ask our China team for a Xiaohongshu campaign plan. Before any of that money can be spent, though, you need an account.
Verify a Xiaohongshu professional account with your UAE company documents, then open Juguang through an authorised agency. You don't need a Chinese company.
Upload your certificate of incorporation or trade licence with a Chinese translation, plus a trademark certificate if you advertise under a brand. Verification costs 600 yuan a year and review takes about three working days for a clean application. Juguang won't work with you until this account exists.
Juguang is prepaid, and overseas companies usually open and fund it through an authorised cross-border agency, which also handles the payment from abroad. Allow two to three weeks from decision to a live account.
Some industries can't verify at all, and overseas companies have their own admission list. Most medical and health categories are closed, and finance is limited to institutions licensed by China's own regulators. A UAE clinic or fund should check the list before planning anything.
Once the account is live, the next problem is the one DMCC hit on its first campaign: more enquiries than the team could answer.
Through Little Red Book's own lead tools inside private messages. Since 7 January 2025, auto-replies and welcome messages on professional accounts can't contain a WeChat ID or phone number, and contact details have to go through the platform's lead tools and its social media card.
The rules tightened again in March 2025: steering users to trade anywhere outside the platform's own tools can bring warnings, restrictions and, for repeat offenders, a permanent ban. Any plan that ends with "add us on WeChat" in the bio is a plan to get muted.
Build the follow-up inside the rules instead. For DMCC, registration links went out automatically by private message, so a flood of enquiries no longer needed a person to answer each one, and every registration fed one system for reminders and check-in. We wire those leads into HubSpot, so you can see which notes turn into pipeline.
Businesses selling a big, researched decision to Chinese buyers: free zones and business setup, universities and training providers, hotels and tourism, and professional services for Chinese founders.
That includes buyers already here. About 370,000 Chinese people live in the UAE, according to China's ambassador in 2025, and they use Little Red Book to find everything from restaurants to company setup advice. Dubai-based Chinese creators reach them best, so ask your agency what your ad account can target outside mainland China before you budget for ads.
If you sell to procurement teams in mainland China, start elsewhere. Baidu and WeChat Search do that job better, and they sit alongside Xiaohongshu among the Chinese marketing platforms UAE businesses should use.
Search Xiaohongshu, in Chinese, for your category and your city: 迪拜公司注册 for company setup in Dubai, or 迪拜留学 for studying in Dubai. Read the top ten notes. If none of them mentions you, or the ones that do are two years old, someone else is answering your buyers' questions.
Oxygen's China team will audit what Little Red Book shows for your category, which creators and competitors own those searches, and where ads would pay back first. Book a Xiaohongshu audit with our China team.