RedNote in Australia: What It Is, Who Uses It and Whether Your Business Needs It

Search "RedNote Australia" and you get a mix of news stories, app-store pages and agency sites. This is a plain answer to the questions behind that search: what RedNote is, who uses it in Australia, what businesses actually do on it, and whether it is worth your time.

What RedNote is

RedNote is the English name of Xiaohongshu (小红书, "little red book"). It is operated by a Shanghai company, Xingyin Information Technology, and launched in 2013 as a shopping-recommendation community. It has since grown into a search-first lifestyle platform: photo carousels and short videos with long, detailed captions that people read like reviews. Posts are called notes.

The behaviour matters more than the format. People open RedNote and search it the way they would search Google: a dish, a suburb, a clinic, a tutor. They read what other customers wrote, save the notes they like into lists, and decide from there. That is why it works for venues and local services in a way a purely entertainment feed does not.

The English name only became widely known in January 2025. SBS News reported on 15 January 2025 that RedNote was in the top spot on Apple's App Store in both Australia and the United States, as TikTok users went looking for an alternative. Most of the businesses that benefit from the platform are not looking at that wave of curiosity, though. They are looking at the people who were already there.

Who uses RedNote in Australia

RedNote has roughly 700,000 monthly active users in Australia by industry estimates. That is an estimate repeated across media coverage, not a figure the platform publishes for Australia, so use it as a sense of scale rather than a measurement. The population behind it is easier to check. From official sources:

• Chinese-Australians. In the ABS 2021 Census, 1,390,639 people reported Chinese ancestry (5.5% of the population), including 409,285 in Greater Melbourne (8.3%). Ancestry is a multiple-response question, so read this as "people who reported Chinese ancestry", not a head count of one group.
• Mandarin speakers. The same census recorded 685,274 people using Mandarin at home nationally (2.7%), and 212,680 in Greater Melbourne (4.3%). Another 295,281 used Cantonese at home.
• International students. The Department of Education reported 687,810 international students studying in Australia in the year to June 2026, with China the largest source country at 23% of international students.
• Visitors. Tourism Research Australia found that China was the largest contributor to international visitor spend in Australia, making up 29% of the total spend in Australia in the year ending June 2026.

Not every one of those people is on RedNote, and many users with no Chinese-language background joined in early 2025. But if your customers include Chinese speakers, this is a large group that already searches in Chinese before it spends.

What people actually do on it

Typical searches are local and close to a purchase: "Melbourne brunch", "Box Hill hot pot", "Melbourne buyer's agent", "best English tutor Melbourne". The note that answers the question, with real photos from a real visit, gets saved and shared. Notes keep collecting views for months, because people search for them long after they were posted.

Peer content carries more weight than anything a business says about itself. A note from someone who actually went outperforms an advertisement, which is why creator visits sit at the centre of most programs.

Which Australian businesses are on it

SmartCompany reported in January 2025 that ASX-listed companies including Medibank and Sydney Airport have established a presence on the platform, alongside small operators such as a Melbourne candle and fragrance business. Locally, the businesses we work with include restaurants and cafes, clinics and car dealerships, and beauty, education and property businesses are active on the platform too. We have written separate guides on restaurant marketing on RedNote and on business verification for Australian companies.

What "RedNote marketing" means in practice

When an agency says it does RedNote marketing, it usually means four different things, in this rough order of speed:

1. Creator visits. Local creators come to your venue and post about it. Our package is A$299 for 5 creators, a flat fee; you provide the experience and we handle sourcing, briefing and follow-up.
2. Your own account. Consistent notes so that when someone lands on your profile there is something to read. Our RedNote account management starts from A$469/month for 10 original notes, with comment and DM handling and an English monthly report. Bilingual Instagram management is from A$699/month.
3. Business (blue-V) verification. The official business badge. It is also a prerequisite for advertising on the platform, and using a personal account for commercial promotion breaches RedNote's rules.
4. Spotlight ads. RedNote's paid promotion tool, for amplifying content that is already performing. We explain it in our Spotlight ads guide.

What each of these costs, and in what order to buy them, is set out in what RedNote marketing costs in Australia.

Does your business need it?

It is a good fit when Chinese-speaking customers are a meaningful share of who you serve, when people choose you by looking at photos and reading other customers' experiences, and when you can answer a message in Chinese within a day.

It is not the place to start when your customers are almost all English-speaking. Instagram and Google will do more for you, and RedNote can wait. It is also not a quick fix. A brand-new account typically gets a few hundred views in its first month while verification and the content foundation go in. Once an account is running, results can change: a sports physiotherapy clinic account we run recorded 8,294 note views in 30 days, up 84.56% on the previous 30 days, from 21 published notes. We describe the first month honestly in what the first 30 days actually look like.

How to start

1. Decide whether the account is the business's official account or the owner's personal one. For customer acquisition it should be a verified business account.
2. Put searchable words in the account name: brand, category and area, such as "Brand · Hot Pot · Melbourne Box Hill".
3. Plan a steady rhythm rather than a burst. We work to 10 original notes a month.
4. Add creator visits early if you want people through the door while your own account builds.

Redluck Digital is an officially certified Xiaohongshu (RedNote) operations service provider with a bilingual team in Melbourne's Box Hill. The Melbourne RedNote marketing page lists what is included and what it costs, and Chinese-language readers can start at our 中文服务页.

Sources: ABS 2021 Census QuickStats (Australia and Greater Melbourne); Department of Education, International student monthly summary, June 2026 YTD; Tourism Research Australia, International Visitor Survey Results, June quarter 2026; SBS News, 15 January 2025; SmartCompany, 15 January 2025.