The Ultimate Guide to Clubhouse
Clubhouse, the new social platform of 2021 has seen huge growth in recent months, despite its invite-only approach. Momentum has been building since Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg made surprise appearances on Clubhouse causing people to pay attention and notice that Clubhouse is the place to be. In this post we will explore Clubhouse and how brands can look to use it in the future.
What is Clubhouse?
Clubhouse was created in May 2020 by Paul Davison and Rohan Seth. It is an invite-only, audio-only social media app that allows users to create, host and join chatrooms for discussions. Upon opening the app, you are met with a list of ‘rooms’ that you can join, or you can create your own room. Each room has a different topic, often hosted by an expert in the field. There are no videos, no pictures, and hardly any text - it’s purely audio.
Which influencers or people of importance have made an appearance on Clubhouse so far?
Elon Musk
Mark Zuckerberg
Meek Hill
Drake
Jared Leto
Oprah Winfrey
Mark Cuban
Lindsey Lohan
Kevin Hart
Chris Rock
Ashton Kutcher
How can I get an invite to Clubhouse?
The best way to get an invite is to reach out to your own network. Post on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram and let people know you want to join.
How can I get involved in Clubhouse?
There are three types of users including speaker, listener and moderator.
Speaker - If you’re brought up to the stage as a speaker, you’ll have the ability to mute and unmute your microphone.
Listener - When you first join a Clubhouse room, you join as a listener - you don’t have access to the microphone, but you can listen to the conversation as it unfolds.
Moderator - There are two ways to become a moderator in a Clubhouse room - that’s either by opening a new room or having a current moderator in the room you’re in to promote you from speaker to moderator.
How can businesses benefit from joining Clubhouse?
There are a number of ways businesses can benefit from Clubhouse, we’ve collated a list of them for you below:
Clubhouse gives your brand a voice that won’t get lost in all the noise of social media.
It also gives you an opportunity to tell your brand story.
Businesses are also able to share their successes and failures and give genuine human engagement.
Clubhouse is a great opportunity to build business relationships and grow your network.
Clubhouse will send notifications to all followers when you’re on stage so there is a great opportunity for your content to be heard by many people.
Clubhouse is like social listening so you can follow influential people in your industry, keep tabs on your competitors, and follow the categories related to your niche.
Finally, it’s the perfect opportunity to test your business ideas and get genuine feedback from others.
Here are our top tips on how to use Clubhouse
Round table discussions work best – not a hierarchy of someone speaking. When people can join in and speak, they stick around for longer.
Remember Clubhouse rooms are about connection, not room size or follower count.
Raise your hand to ask moderators to let you speak.
You can leave a room any time by ‘peacing out’.
Use a room topic title that draws listeners in but isn’t too niche.
Your bio shows up as SEO, so it is key to communicate what value can you offer in the first three lines.
Don’t sell. Share and give value instead.
Showing up and actually participating in groups is vital.
Co-hosting groups is critical. Partner with people to host rooms on a certain topic.
You need to reset the room a few times for all the new people that have joined – this simply means clarifying the topic of the room and introducing the host and moderators to new people in the room. It’s good to reset your room every 15-30 minutes.
A good length for a programme is 60 to 90 minutes.
Remind people to ping their connections but don’t go overboard.
Elise Mendelle, Creative Director at Mighty Social said “I think Clubhouse is going to be around for a while. I’m currently trying to immerse myself in it as much as possible so I can advise my clients of its potential when the time comes.” Elle Benfield, Junior Digital Designer at Mighty Social and all round social media obsessive added, “I’m currently asking everyone I know if they have an invite. I have to know more about this!”
But will Clubhouse be the next big thing?
The question that matters the most – is this a fad or will it be here to stay? Well the truth is, no one knows just yet. From what we can see, Clubhouse has only two million active users but it has been growing rapidly over the last few months. At first glance, Clubhouse appears simply to be a good idea with no technical tricks behind it but to put it simply that does mean that competitors are able to copy the idea. Twitter is already working on its own version, called ‘spaces’.
One thing to note is that we believe Clubhouse may face misuse of the private chat feature as conversations are not recorded or saved - so once a chatroom is closed, anything that has been discussed is completely private and protected. We will be interested to see this plays out and how Clubhouse respond if there any instances of misuse and what they are able to do to protect their users going forward. For now, let’s all just watch this space.