Why every entrepreneur needs to be on Clubhouse

Clubhouse is the buzzword on everyone’s lips right now. The invite-only app has tongues wagging — what is it, is it any good, will it fall to the wayside like so many other social platforms, and is it worth the hype?

I’ve been on Clubhouse for the past week, and yesterday started my own show/room/club with a co-host. It’s early days (Clubhouse is still technically in beta and only for iPhone users) but first impressions are good and I’ve come to the conclusion that every marketer should be on there.

Here’s why:

1. As a small platform with a lot of hype, you get disproportionate attention
2. There are big hitters on there, and Clubhouse gives an unbelievable level of access to them and their social circle
3. There’s a more organic, human element to the conversations
4. It fits in perfectly to your overall marketing strategy

Let’s go through these in more detail:

Disproportionate attention

As a small platform, you have the opportunity to establish yourself early. You can do this either by being a familiar face in lots of rooms on a given topic (like start-ups or fitness), or by starting your own room and getting a head start on building a following.

Clubhouse’s brilliance is that not everyone in a room can speak at once. There are speakers, and there is the audience — exactly like being at a talk show or seminar. The reason I like this is it keeps the signal:noise ratio balanced, and avoids the issue every other social platform has of giving everyone a voice and having to deal with trolls and hijacked conversations.

Audience members can request to participate, though. There’s a feature called “raise your hand” and it notifies the speakers that you have something to say. If they accept, you can share your thoughts. What a great way to join a conversation or add value to a captive audience.

There’s also an intimacy to Clubhouse that is hard to find on larger, more established platforms like Facebook. This means people will quickly start to recognise you and follow you. I was in a podcasting room a few days ago, and one of the participants said “I’m just here because I saw [name] was in here, and he was really helpful to me yesterday.” Clubhouse notifies you when people you follow are in other rooms, encouraging your followers to listen to you regularly.

The potential for this is huge. The reason I say you have disproportionate attention is because you’re one of a relatively small number of people, and any room you create will have far less competition than any new group on Facebook.

If you get in early and establish yourself, by the time Clubhouse has a general launch, you’ll be in a prime position to capture a lot of those new users as followers.

Taking advantage of the big hitters

On my first day on Clubhouse, I was in a room with Grant Cardone and his friends. By “friends”, I mean other hugely successful people with massive knowledge and significant influence of their own. I was a little awestruck that suddenly I was a fly on the wall in a conversation amongst some of the marketing industry’s biggest people, listening to them discuss tactics for Clubhouse.

It will be harder to become a speaker in these rooms, considering people with this level of fame are constantly bombarded by others trying to leverage their size. But my recommendation is to just listen in these rooms. Appreciate what you’re hearing in the conversations.

Clubhouse isn’t the same as a Facebook Live. In a Live, it’s invariably the page owner talking to the camera to communicate with the audience, as a marketing tactic. With Clubhouse, you’re listening to conversations amongst friends and peers. Have a notebook and pen available because the nuggets of wisdom are relentless.

Ordinarily, to have this sort of proximity requires paying for access to a mastermind group, and Clubhouse gives it away for free.

Don’t be surprised if this doesn’t last forever. Once it opens up to everybody, Clubhouse could become too congested for the big names to stick around. Or if they introduce a paid tier, expect to shell out subscriptions to hear them.

There’s a human element

In his book “The Circle”, Dave Eggars explains how an Internet company all but eradicated trolls and online abusers by making all users have their real name and details visible. Without the ability to hide behind fake names, people were less willing to be unpleasant.

Clubhouse hasn’t used the same model, but my experience so far is that the creators have managed to build a very pleasant platform.

Firstly, it doesn’t have the comments that YouTube, Instagram and Facebook Lives allow — the audience is silent. This means nobody can type out rude comments to other commenters or the speakers.

Secondly, room moderators can mute others. If a situation arose where a speaker turned nasty, the moderators can mute their microphone and put them into the audience, where they’re unable to speak.

Thirdly, any abuse would need to be verbal. I expect Clubhouse will play host to some disagreements and heated debates, but people are less likely to hurl abuse and insults if they have to verbally say it rather than type it.

Beyond the pleasant nature, Clubhouse is also enjoyable because you’re actually talking to other people. It’s so much more personal than typing a message, and stronger bonds will come from it.

Clubhouse is an excellent TOFU channel

It’s well-known that the established social media platforms penalise posts that link offsite. For example, if you share a post on LinkedIn with a link to your YouTube channel, its visibility will be lower than if that link pointed to LinkedIn’s Pulse network.

That makes it challenging to use one network to grow one of your others.

Not with Clubhouse.

As of right now, Clubhouse doesn’t have a messaging feature. Instead, it’s become the norm for everyone to say “Follow me on Instagram and I’ll send you the link to the article” or “visit me on Instagram to talk further.”

So if you’re already doing well on another platform, or you’re trying to grow elsewhere, Clubhouse is an excellent facilitator of that.

Let’s say you’ve got a nice website with great content (or a strong Instagram profile, or Twitter, or wherever), Clubhouse is an amazing resource for getting high quality and free traffic.

Similar to the Facebook groups strategy of joining groups related to your niche and posting high quality content to build a reputation, with Clubhouse you join rooms related to your niche. You listen to what’s being said, and join the speaker panels to share your own input. People will click on your bio and find your links to your other digital assets, and follow you there.

And if you start your own room, you can build that authority rapidly. Especially if you spend a little time being a listener first — listen, add value, and connect with the room leaders. Then invite them to your rooms, and their followers will be alerted.

Think of it like a ripple effect in water. You inviting someone to a room is that first tiny ripple, then all of their followers are notified that they’re in your room. As those people join, their followers are notified, and so on.

Make your room a regular occurrence (there’s a calendar, so you can set up recurring events and your followers will be notified) and you’ll quickly start to build a loyal audience, acquiring a lot of additional eyeballs on your other platforms and website.

Think ahead — have a monetising strategy

As of right now, Clubhouse is free. There aren’t any ads and it doesn’t cost any money to become a member.

At some point in the future, that will need to change. There’s no way of knowing with certainty what model they’ll use, but there are a few options.

1. They can run ads, keeping the platform free (like Twitter, Facebook etc)
2. They can charge a premium subscription (like YouTube has introduced)
3. They can let creators charge (like Patreon and OnlyFans)

If it stays the way it is, or becomes ad-supported like Facebook, then you can either use Clubhouse as a top of funnel (TOFU) platform to send people to your income-generating sites, or you can make Clubhouse your VIP area. For example, there are plenty of Facebook groups that are only accessible if you’ve bought into a membership or course.

Alternatively, Clubhouse could be the VIP backstage area — let’s say you release a podcast or YouTube video, then anyone who subscribes to your Patreon can join you for a 60-minute Q&A afterwards. Setting this up would be simple: you’d only allow room access to people who have joined your paid option.

And if Clubhouse itself introduces the ability for creators to charge, like Patreon and OnlyFans do, then the sky is the limit. You can have a free room that siphons people into your paid tier.

Spend time getting familiar with Clubhouse, and it will become clear how it can become a revenue source for you in the future.

Will Clubhouse still be here a year from now? As the cliche goes, only time will tell. Good platforms have fallen by the wayside and more popular ones usually have the key features assimilated by Facebook and Instagram. Clubhouse feels like it has real potential, though. In many ways, it’s exactly how a communication platform should be.

If you’ve got the opportunity to sign up, I strongly suggest you do. It could just be the future of social networking.