Clubhouse App for Business: What Marketers Need to Know

Wondering if the Clubhouse app could benefit your business? Curious how Clubhouse works for marketing?

In this article, you'll learn why businesses should consider being active on Clubhouse and discover what marketers should know about the app. You'll find out how content discovery works on Clubhouse and how clubs work. You'll also get tips to grow a following on Clubhouse.

Why Clubhouse Matters for Businesses and Marketers

Clubhouse delivers a social experience very similar to an audio-only virtual event on a massive scale. There are currently approximately 1 million users on Clubhouse, and at any given time, there are a few thousand rooms where people from around the world are holding conversations about different industries, professions, and interests.

For a guided tour of Clubhouse and how to interact with others in rooms and clubs, watch the video below.

The voice-only constraint is similar to podcasts, which are played on demand, but the ephemeral nature of Clubhouse's content plays on FOMO (fear of missing out). The conversations happen live and aren't recorded for playback. If you're not in the room, you miss what's happening. This means people are spending a lot of time on the app, anticipating and looking for conversations about topics they're interested in—whether to listen or share from the stage.

If you're a marketer or business owner, this presents an amazing opportunity to establish yourself or the brand you work with as a go-to resource and promote products, services, or events.

Opportunities to share your brand story or your founding story, connect with customers, get product feedback, run impromptu focus groups, and generate marketing awareness are ready for the taking on Clubhouse.

Successful Use Case Examples

Simply by providing a lot of value, you can become very well-known for the quality of your advice and develop real-world connections that lead to business. In the Startup Club room, an intellectual property attorney was answering questions from the audience. By the end of the 2-hour conversation, she'd connected with approximately 20 new clients.

What's more, the nature of Clubhouse lends itself perfectly to building brand awareness through word-of-mouth campaigns. Former CEO and President of Focus Brands (the parent company of Cinnabon) Kat Cole hosts a weekly office hours room to help other businesspeople and entrepreneurs find their way in business. For a few weeks, she would say, “Hey, if anyone wants some Cinnabon, just send me your address. I'll send you Cinnabons.” For the next 2 weeks, pretty much every Clubhouse room Ed was in was talking about Cinnabon.

Brands are also beginning to sponsor rooms. Bite Toothpaste recently sponsored a room where the company's founders shared their founding story and gathered approximately 30 new customers.

Finally, because Clubhouse makes it easy for people to find each other and assemble, it's possible to connect with people you might not otherwise speak to for advice about partnerships, hiring, investments, and more. Mike Stelzner recalls he was in a live Shark Tank room when Grant Cardone offered to invest in a multimillion-dollar deal.

#1: How to Find People, Rooms, and Clubs to Follow

The key to a valuable and manageable Clubhouse experience is to be very strategic with the people, rooms, and clubs you follow. Following any of these too randomly can lead to seeing too many rooms and clubs you're not interested in. If you're careful with what and who you follow, the hallway will almost always show you rooms that match your interests.

The central organizing metaphor of the app is built around its name: Clubhouse. When you first open the app, you're in the hallway and you'll see a list of rooms.

These rooms will mostly be based on the people and clubs you follow but you'll see trending rooms as well. If you're new to the app, it will recommend some people for you to follow who are often contacts in your phone directory.

The style and size of rooms in the hallway will vary from big keynote-style rooms to large panel rooms to small rooms with a few people, any one of which could be hosting a discussion on any topic.

As you wander into rooms, you'll discover other interesting people to follow on the stage or in the audience. Subsequently, the variety and number of rooms showing in your hallway will change and grow.

The more time you spend on Clubhouse, the more likely you'll find yourself in a public room hosted by a club. You can tap on the green house icon to learn more about the club, look at the membership, and decide whether to follow it.

As you spend more time on the app, look at the people and clubs followed by the people you follow to find others that might interest you.

Search the Member Directory, Club Directory, and Event Calendar

The member and club directories are both searchable by keywords, as is the event calendar, which shows upcoming scheduled events. Searching each of these by terms that relate to your interests is a good way to find more people, rooms, and clubs to follow.

Browse the Front Row

When you're in a room, you'll see three sections of people. The first section, the stage, shows the speakers. The second section, the front row, shows people followed by the speakers. The third section shows the audience. Tapping on people in the front row can reveal more people you may decide to follow.

#2: How to Grow a Following on Clubhouse App

Growing a following on Clubhouse can have massive implications for your business. If your goal is to position yourself and attract a following, you need to be active on the app and show up on stages.

While it might be tempting to jump into large rooms, the chance of you being noticed in a crowd of 5,000 other people is slim. Rooms with 5, 10, or 20 people in the audience present a better chance you'll be invited on stage.

Be sure the rooms you enter are relevant to your industry and get to know the people who frequent them. As you get more active and show up consistently, the people who host those rooms are more likely to pull you up onto the stage where people in the audience will notice you. The more you're on stage, the more followers you'll attract.

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When you're brought on stage, don't use your time to tell people who you are, what you do, who you work with, and so on. Instead, focus on delivering value. Either ask your question or answer a question clearly and succinctly. Provide value and people on Clubhouse will click on your bio to learn more about you and follow you.

Then every time you open a room or join a stage, the people who follow you will get a notification that you're live. Before you know it, you'll have built a small tribe.

Optimize Your Clubhouse Bio for Building a Network

Your Clubhouse bio is where you can tell everyone what you want to be known for. What you include in your bio will determine how people find you via searches in the member directory or the club directory, and the type of followers you attract.

Rather than an online bio, take the time to create an extended informational bio and include emojis. Make sure to include all of the basics: Where you work, your title, your content channels and social media profiles, and any clubs you've launched. Although Clubhouse doesn't support links in the bio, you'll want to include the username for each profile and a call to action leading people to connect with and message you on your main social media platform.

Pro Tip: Consider changing your bio and picture depending on the room you're in at the time.

Collaborate With Others

When you create a room, be sure you're not the only one on the stage. Partner with people within your industry who have a bigger following than you do. When your partners come on stage, their followers get a notification and are likely to jump into the room and follow you as well. Nicky estimates it's possible to attract 500 new followers in a day using this strategy.

#3: Tips for Hosting a Clubhouse Room

When you create a room, you automatically become a moderator for that room. As moderator, you control who comes up on stage, you can mute people, and you can give other people the role of moderator.

As host, your goal is to bring order to the room and anticipate what the audience needs.

Sometimes, that might mean taking a short break, during which you prompt the audience to follow your moderators. When you welcome everyone back, you might prompt them to ping someone they know into the room.

You'll also want to take advantage of the diversity in Clubhouse's global audience. Include voices of people from around the world who have different perspectives to make your conversations more interesting, relatable, and valuable to your audience.

#4: Use Clubs on Clubhouse

The hallway is a list of rooms, rooms are where discussions happen, the event calendar shows rooms that have been scheduled, and clubs make it easy to assemble people in advance for future events or rooms—whether those rooms are public or private.

A club's public rooms are open to anyone. Anyone who follows your club will get a notification when you create or open a public room.

You can create private rooms that let members have discussions with one another or allow you to deliver exclusive access and information you don't want to share publicly.

Your club can have multiple admins, which means you don't have to personally create, host, and moderate every room. Choose to let your admins create rooms on behalf of your club. For example, Ed's Community Club has 26 admins who host multiple rooms throughout each day.

Other Notes From This Episode:

• Episode sponsored by Iconosquare. For a free 30-day trial and an additional 30% off any annual plan if you decide to stay, visit iconosquare.com/sme.
• Follow Michael Stelzner on Clubhouse at @Stelzner and follow the Social Media Examiner Club.
• Get your ticket to the Social Media Marketing Workshops at marketingworkshops.live.
• Watch exclusive content and original videos from Social Media Examiner on YouTube.
• Tune into our weekly Social Media Marketing Talk Show. Watch live on Fridays at 12 PM Pacific on YouTube. Listen to the replay on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts.

What do you think? Are you on Clubhouse? How are you using Clubhouse for marketing? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

More articles on Clubhouse App:

• Discover what Clubhouse is and why it might become a breakout social platform.
• Learn how to navigate the Clubhouse app and discover how to use Clubhouse to build your authority and your business.
• Find out how the pros host and moderate a room, add other moderators, bring people to the stage, mute people, and more.

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