Thursday, 11th February 2021 Heading to the club this weekend? And by club, we mean Clubhouse…

Clubhouse is a new social media platform that is based around an app. It is all audio and works by members joining together in themed rooms for discussions hosted by other members. You can then choose to simply listen in, join the chat, or simply slip out if you aren’t into the conversation. The vast majority of people don’t speak on here – just listen in, hence the ‘live podcasting’ comparisons it is getting. You can also access the profiles of everyone in the room allowing you to see others with common connections and follow them.

The app itself is currently in beta testing phase and also currently only iPhone (sorry Android users…but apparently it is coming) and despite being the new kid on the block, it is creating quite the buzz. So much so, that Facebook yesterday announced they are set to build their own version for testing.

I downloaded and signed up a couple of weeks ago and have been playing around with it, At first I was not completely sure as it just seemed to be a lot of people on the self-promotion thing… but having spent some time digging around I can see its potential. For me, at the minimum, it has been enjoyable background noise and increasingly there are interesting people signing up who I either know in real life or follow on other social media platforms – so it is great to hear them speak. Before you do, here are some tips from my user experience for those looking to jump into the conversation.

On signing up

Invites – When you sign up – you will get invites that you can share with friends. Outside of getting these invites there is as yet no access to the site. Make sure if sending to friends they have an iPhone and will also accept and sign up, as there is no way to cancel an invite currently. If one of your contacts signs up for Clubhouse and joins the waiting list, you do however also get the option to let them in (power)!

‘Following’ – Again when you initially sign up, you will be asked if you want to automatically follow a bunch of people with large followers (i.e. Clubhouse influencers) who are already on the site. I would recommend you not to do this as a mass accept, because half of these you will probably have no interest in. If you do follow them, you then get a notification whenever any of them are involved in a discussion on the app, which can be annoying. So it is best to just follow people you have a genuine interest in from the outset. The only exception I would make to this is that you will get asked if you want to follow the Clubhouse founders/ lead team. I would recommend this as they seem to be involved in getting the big names on the site currently – in recent days Elon Musk, Kanye West and Mark Zuckerberg have all been on the app participating in discussions.

Interests – On signing up you will also get asked your interests – be specific on these around topics that you would genuinely like to listen into conversations on. There are a lot of clubs already established, so click on search and find clubs that you might like to join on specific themes. I found this a better way to find groups I am genuinely interested in. You can also see, when you click on peoples profiles see which groups they are following. Find people you admire or like and then see which groups they are part of.

Once you are up and rolling in the Club

Notifications – On the above point on ‘following’, when you get a notification on your phone about a room in discussion, the notification itself takes you directly into the room. You can easily leave the room – no problem, but be prepared your own followers (as above) might then get an alert letting them know you are in that room. So be careful which notifications you click on as a couple of friends have questioned my lifestyle choices when I have entered a random room at 3am due to an accidental click. You can see all the pre-scheduled discussions in the notification section of your app, so there is also an argument for switching notifications off in phone settings too I guess.

Contacts – The ‘contacts’ in here are pulled from your phone. This means you get notifications when anyone in your phone joins. Now, I don’t know about you but I haven’t touched my Cloud in years, so you get a lot of random people from your past popping up in the app with a note asking if you want to follow them. This has its pros and cons I guess…

On this, I would also therefore think about who you follow on other channels and might not be in your phone contact list, as you will need to search for them in the app.

Overall, my advice would be if you like people, like podcasts and enjoy discussions on your interests then give it a shot. The general POV is that they will monetise the groups soon to create a sort of audio version of Only Fans, that is (probably) slightly less salacious, so best to be on board now before that happens.

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