What is Clubhouse?

Clubhouse is a new social media platform that has been making waves in the community while it’s still in beta. Looking to go public soon, this app is a unique and fresh take on the social networking trend that many users are already dedicated to strengthening its community further.

This article will cover exactly what this new social media platform is and what makes it different from all the others out there. Plus, we’ll quickly go over a few key features and how you can join in the community yourself.

THE BASICS OF CLUBHOUSE

If you have been around social media recently, you might have come across this new app and wondered what it’s really all about. Clubhouse allows its users to talk in real time, collaborate, and share stories using their voices without the necessity for any special equipment.

Unlike other social media platforms, it has a layer of exclusivity. An invitation to this platform is how you get in and this helps create a much more quality user base free of any spam bots or fake profiles. Clubhouse has become a new hot spot for business owners and professionals alike.

WHAT SEPARATES CLUBHOUSE FROM OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS?

Clubhouse is making a splash in the industry as one of the most unique new social media platforms that improves on many aspects that have turned people off of the big name sites. A few of the ways Clubhouse pushes a new formula are:

• Rooms are created spontaneously for all kinds of topics and take place as real-time chats among users.
• Clubhouse focuses on conversation and being social rather than content production.
• The users are loyal and want to create a space where they can have quality conversations.
• It is invite only, so the user base is generally well connected and there’s no fake profiles.
• Focus on audio, expects its users to talk to others in chat rooms rather than focus on written or video content.

In 2020, there was a huge boom in talking to one another digitally and Clubhouse is one of the few social media platforms that allows you to engage in these real-time chats easily. What could certainly be the future of virtual business meetings, this app can make them much easier for everyone.

It is also possible to record your rooms’ conversations so long as all the users involved agree with it. This makes virtual interviews and talks that need to be documented easy and safe. Of course, recording a conversation has to be started at the beginning of the room so everyone who joins knows as well.

Clubhouse is also perfect for podcast communities and can host rooms for live recordings or simply keep your podcast team together in a private chat to record an episode easily.

JOINING CLUBHOUSE

Clubhouse is in its private beta phase still and it is available to iPhone users exclusively. For now, new users can join in through two methods that both require you to know someone already using the app. You can join Clubhouse by:

1. Invitation

When you first join Clubhouse, you are automatically given an invitation that you can send to a friend or relative through their phone number. Users can earn more invitations by spending some time moderating rooms and generally being part of the community.

2. Exclusive Side Door

If you download the Clubhouse app you can reserve your username and any friends you have that are on the app already will get a notification that you reserved a username. Even if they have no invitations to spare, they will know your username is set in stone and all you need is the invite.

LISTENERS, SPEAKERS, AND MODERATORS

There are three things you could be when entering a chat room which is a listener, speaker, or moderator. Each of these roles have different capabilities and we’ll go over exactly what each one can do in a chatroom.

Listener

If you simply join a random room, you join in a listener. As a listener, you can’t use your microphone but it is a good idea to sit and listen for a while after joining a room to get caught up on the conversation topic.

You can also do other things as a listener such as, check your email or look around for other chatrooms. While you can’t speak as a listener you have much more freedom to do other tasks while listening.

If you wish to speak up, you do have an option to tap on a hand in the bottom-right corner. This allows you to raise your hand so you can be possibly called on to speak.

Speaker

People from the audience can be called up as a speaker, they can now mute or unmute their microphones at will. Typically run by the moderators, the speakers will get a certain amount of time to speak and then usually mute their microphones and head back to the audience when they’re finished.

Large rooms will usually allow speakers to only go for a couple of minutes before heading back to the audience, while small rooms will sometimes have a more open format and even allow many speakers to come up at once.

Moderator

A chatroom’s moderator is the one that is essentially in charge of guiding the chatroom. If you open a new room, you automatically become the moderator of that room but you can also be appointed moderator by another one in a room you did not create.

Moderators have many things they can do in their chatrooms such as, invite audience members to become speakers, mute speakers, allow listeners to raise their hands or not, and create other moderators.

There is a lot of responsibility as the moderator of a room but, as a moderator, you will be the one to lead the conversation topic. The moderator does not always have to speak but can interject at any time to start a new conversation or add some details to the current one.

SUMMARY

Clubhouse has been gaining all kinds of traction as a new social media platform with many unique features and a dedicated user base.

It is still in its beta stages but will likely go public and surely can make a big splash as one of the best alternatives to networking available today.