Clubhouse is the hot new social app of the moment, sparking buzzy chatter among social influencers and a raft of FOMO-inducing tweets of Clubhouse conversation highlights. The app has been praised for its simplicity, and its capacity to facilitate real community and discussion – but the question for digital marketers is ‘should this platform be on our radar?’
Is there marketing potential within the many rooms of the Clubhouse app?
The answer to that largely depends on your business, and what you’re looking to achieve, but to give you an idea, here’s an overview of the ins and outs of Clubhouse, how it works, and what its potential for your business may be.
You can listen in, or you could get called on as a participant in the chat, but the central premise is that this is a virtual clubhouse, with each discussion happening in a different room of said house.
You browse the discussions happening in each room, where you can also see who else is participating in each, and jump in and out of chats, relative to your interests (image via YourStory).
It’s a fairly simple, but engaging premise, and Clubhouse has benefited significantly from the major buzz around the app, which has resulted in various big-name stars and celebrities jumping into Clubhouse rooms, immediately drawing big crowds.
The biggest of these was Tesla founder Elon Musk, whose recent Clubhouse appearance broke the 5,000 person limit for a room, and saw users creating secondary listening rooms and live-streams on other platforms to follow the conversation. Clubhouse has also hosted a live-reading of The Lion King musical, while even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently joined a Clubhouse chat – no doubt to take some notes for Facebook’s coming duplicate feature.
As the hype has grown, so has the app’s audience, with Clubhouse going from 600,000 active users in December, to 2 million just over a month later.
An important element to note here, also, is that Clubhouse is not actually open to the public as yet.
The app is currently invite-only, with each new user able to allocate a selected number of invites to whomever they choose. That’s helped to further boost the hype around the app, with those who do have access sparking more FOMO as they share notes on the many conversations and discussions occurring behind that exclusive wall. That’s also made Clubhouse invites a badge of honor within themselves – some people are even selling app invites on eBay for up to $125 each.
Clubhouse also doesn’t currently have an Android app, which is in development.
Given the app’s rapid growth, despite these restrictions, you can see why investors are watching Clubhouse closely. The app recently raised a new funding round on a $1 billion valuation.
Originally published by
Andrew Hutchinson | February 8, 2021
Social Media Today
