How Clubhouse Can Dominate Social Media in 2021
Everyone’s been talking about Clubhouse, the new audio, invite-only app where people gather together in chat rooms & host discussions with with one another. I won’t lie, at first I hated this idea, not Clubhouse necessarily, but the way it caused people behave. Personally, I don’t like anything that resembles high school, bullies or any narcissistic behavior. FOMO is a better way of putting it, a “we’re having so much & you’re not! haha!!” mentality was spreading rapidly throughout Twitter, and it got on my god damn nerves so much I almost muted the word “Clubhouse” entirely.
But overtime the application began to expand, more users had been joining, and the “FOMO” strategy actually worked out, quite well. A few weeks ago, Clubhouse was given a $1B valuation amongst various venture capitalists in funding. Starting just nine months ago, you gotta give it to them, they did pretty damn well. One key aspect of their large valuation is their enormous & unique user base, this is crucially important for when CH begins actually monetizing their platform, and with a 100M+ userbase, selling advertising spots to Fortune 100 & 500 companies will be a breeze. Clubhouse is just getting started and they’re already seeing exponential growth with it still being Q1 of 2021. So there’s really only one question:
What’s next?
There’s been many ideas thrown around on social media, especially the execrable #MarketingTwitter mob of what Club House should do next to improve their brand platform. One of the most creative & admirable people I follow, Raymond Smith (CEO & Co-founder of The Digital Footprint) actually laid out an entire deck jam packed with genius ideas & concepts for Club House’s innovation. You can take a look at that here.
For me, I typically despise when a platform “innovates” themselves to the point I don’t even want to use it anymore, but CH should definitely consider some of these great ideas being shared, because as you know, listening to the end user and what they ACTUALLY want is very very important. For starters, Kurt Schrader (CEO) & CH should absolutely consider how they plan on monetizing their platform, in ways it won’t create unnecessary friction with its users. Maybe Clubhouse could make sponsored chat rooms? Brands could partner with CH to host events, product launches, networking events, hiring events? DTC style marketing is back on the rise, and there’s no better way to get direct-to-consumer more than literally talking to them in a live chatroom, sponsored rooms have the potential to drive massive top line for Clubhouse’s revenue & to stay liquid in 2021–2022.
More suggestions advise CH to start video chats as well. I personally don’t think they should because it might dampen the proclivity for “not so camera-oriented” people to join rooms and feel comfortable talking without the awkward Zoom pressure to show their faces, which is partly why I think CH has an enormous advantage for non-photogenic users. But I could be wrong.
One huge caveat that needs rethinking is the invite-only concept. I understand the invite-only strategy was all in fact risky, but nonetheless played a huge role in creating a sense of FOMO & scarcity to attract users, but as the platform continues to grow, as more & more users come onto the platform, this inevitably requires more maintenance & debugging, updates, larger bandwidths, etc. to keep the application fully functioning. They have two options: Option A: They can continue to keep their invite-only concept, assess the risks of discriminating a vast amount of potential users from its large userbase, and increase / or give unlimited invites to the current users. OR Option B: Remove the invite-only completely / or periodically to allow all users to have access to it’s platform.
The Pros of having the invite-only model drives that scarcity to the market place, it creates a new type of emotion that isn’t replicable amongst any known social media platform currently, but the Cons is simple, when CH receives more funding or goes IPO, the invite-only strategy obliterates a great portion of potential users from having access without getting an invite through someone else, and I absolutely think CH should be empathetic towards that, not just for their consumers, but how they plan on making the app profitable in the near future. Which leads to my final assessment.
CLUBHOUSE NEEDS TO BE AVAILABLE FOR ANDROID!!
According to GlobalStats, 38.33% of Americans use android devices. If CH ever wants to compete with big tech (Facebook, Instagram & Twiterr), I’d argue this is probably the most important and necessary innovation CH needs to implement ASAP. Although a majority of users use Apple products, but once you take into account that ads on Clubhouse will be fairly new and ineffective for at least 6 months, plus the fact not many users see or pay attention to advertisements on social media, some can even completely disable them, PLUS the fact that once they do partner with CH for possible ad spot 38.3% of Americans potentially won’t even be able to see the advertisement or be on the platform, that’s definitely going to raise eyebrows in meetings when it gets down to the nitty gritty. Android Report did state Clubhouse plans on making their app available on Google Play Store by the end of 2021.
What do you think Clubhouse could do to add more spice to their platform? Let me know on Twitter. Thanks for reading.
