Monitor what Xiaohongshu (RedNote) users say about a brand in Python

This tutorial outlines how to create a Python script to monitor Xiaohongshu (RedNote) users' comments about a specific brand. Xiaohongshu is a platform where Chinese consumers share reviews, shopping hauls, price comparisons, and complaints about products. The comment sections on this platform often contain more honest feedback than the actual notes themselves, as users ask questions like where they purchased the item, if it broke, or if it's an advertisement.

The script utilizes the Qovia API to search for recent Xiaohongshu notes mentioning the brand, fetch the details of the most engaged notes, collect the first pages of comments under those notes, and store the data in CSV files. The script summarizes the results using pandas to provide daily volume, top notes, hashtags, commenters' locations, and a keyword tally.

To set up the script, you need Python 3.9 or higher, along with the requests and pandas libraries. Create an API key from the Qovia console and set it as the environment variable QOVIA_KEY. The script provides a helper function to make requests to the Qovia API, handling authentication and error responses.

The monitoring process involves searching for recent Xiaohongshu notes that mention the brand using the /v1/raw/xiaohongshu/search endpoint. The search parameters can be customized, such as sorting by relevance, the latest notes, most liked, most commented, or most saved. The script also allows filtering notes by type (all, video, or image) and time frame (day, week, month, or year). After collecting the required data, the script stores the results in CSV files and summarizes them using pandas.