At the moment, one of the most sought-after assets online is an invitation.
Users are requesting Clubhouse invites on Twitter. Marketing professionals are adding their Clubhouse handle to their email signatures. Invites are even being sold online, which is unusual. Elon Musk's appearance in a room at the start of February generated considerable buzz, to Clubhouse's advantage. The app had reportedly passed 8 million downloads by mid-February, even though it is available only on iPhone.
Is this the next major platform or a passing phenomenon? Based on our analysis, Clubhouse shows characteristics of both. Here is our reading of the situation.
What is Clubhouse?
The app displays a list of rooms. Each room is a live conversation: a few people on "stage" speak, the others listen, and you can raise your hand to be invited to speak. There is no video, no text and no official recording. When the room ends, it disappears.
The concept is simple, and in the middle of a pandemic it meets a real need.
People are isolated at home, conferences are cancelled and informal after-work gatherings are impossible. This app lets people join a conversation between founders, musicians or professionals in their own field, and listen while doing other things, or speak up. The appeal is understandable; we have spent a few evenings on the app ourselves.
The Clubhouse Wikipedia page presents the timeline so far: a launch in the spring of 2020, a major funding round in January that valued it at a billion dollars, and many questions about privacy and moderation.
Will the major platforms copy Clubhouse?
It is already happening. When a service gains popularity this quickly, the major platforms respond. Twitter has been testing Spaces since December, and the feature is reaching more users every week. Facebook is reportedly developing its own version, and further announcements are likely before summer.
This represents a significant risk for Clubhouse. The app is still not available on Android, it still requires an invite, and the competing versions are built into apps people already open fifty times a day. If Twitter succeeds with Spaces, many users will not bother downloading an additional app.
Is Clubhouse useful for a small business?
For most small businesses, no, at least not in a way that generates a return.
It is the hosts who benefit. By running a regular room on a subject you master, at the same time each week, you build a small audience that comes to recognize your voice. This benefit is real. A coach, a consultant or someone with a niche specialty can find clients this way.
If you only listen, you are part of the audience for someone else's marketing. That is useful for learning, but it provides no visibility.
For a dive centre, a restaurant or a hardware store, the customers are not there. The rooms we have observed are mostly made up of people from technology, marketing, content creation and investment, talking mainly among themselves. Your guests from Ontario or Germany are not choosing their holiday destination in audio rooms.
What is the limitation of ephemeral audio content?
This is the main reservation. Our approach has long been based on creating content that continues to produce results after publication. A good blog post can attract visitors for years, and a good video keeps being watched. A Clubhouse room disappears the moment it ends: the effort invested leaves nothing behind the next morning.
Even if recording were added, audio remains difficult to reuse. It cannot be skimmed, and Google cannot read it unless it is transcribed. Turning an hour of conversation into useful content requires considerable work. An hour spent talking therefore serves only once.
How should you evaluate a new platform?
By retention, not hype. The metric that matters for a new platform is the number of people who return the following week, not the number of sign-ups in the launch month.
This scenario has played out several times before. Google+ was supposed to overtake Facebook, and Google closed it two years ago. Vine enjoyed a period of great popularity and disappeared in 2017. Periscope, the live video app that generated a great deal of enthusiasm a few years ago, will be shut down by Twitter at the end of this month. A new network appears, the tech press praises it and marketers rush in. Then regular users decide, and they most often return to the platforms they were already using.
Based on observed trends, activity on Clubhouse is likely to decline once people can go out again. The app could nevertheless find a loyal audience. Given the uncertainty, we do not recommend that a small business rely on it.
Our approach to new apps is methodical:
- Set a defined trial period: one month, a few hours a week.
- Check whether your actual customers are present, not just other marketers.
- If they are, continue. If not, step away without hesitation.
Then devote the time saved to your website, your newsletter and the channels where your customers already know you.
What should a business that wants to use audio choose instead?
A podcast. Audio itself is doing well, and podcasts continue to grow. People listen to long conversations in the car, while cooking or while walking the dog, and that habit is lasting.
The difference is that a podcast is recorded, edited and remains available online. It can be discovered next month. You can obtain a rough transcript with a tool such as Otter, revise it and publish it on your own site as an article, which gives Google content to index.
If audio suits you, as it does for some business owners, we recommend this approach: a short recorded show, with its transcript on your site. It takes more time than joining a live room, but it will still be available next year.
Clubhouse is an interesting experience during a pandemic, and it can be worth exploring. We do, however, advise against concentrating a business's marketing efforts there.