I’VE been lurking on Clubhouse (CH) for a little while now, but only properly diving in this week.

Being a bit geeky when it comes to visibility and personal brand, I’ve been doing some research into growth hacking tips and ways to build your audience and, as a result, I’ve gone up by about 100 in the past 24 hours.

I still don’t have a massive follower base there — 574 as of this moment — but it’s growing much faster now I’m employing these techniques.

I hope they help you too — it’s a really power-full platform for networking and brand awareness if we harness it properly.

Building your audience

1) The top 3 lines of your bio are the most important — they’re the ones that appear next to your name, so make ’em super strong!

2) Use emojis in your bio. CH has an emoji search facility, so they’re more important here than any other platform. Do a few emoji searches of your own first and see what pops up — they may not mean what you assume!

3) Rooms are divided into 3 — top part is the stage, middle is people followed by the speakers, bottom is the rest of the audience. In the top section, the room moderators have the green symbols. Understanding this is important.

4) Look for the big hitters, follow them, click on their Insta link on the bio, follow there and message them to say thanks for the room they’ve just moderated; be specific, refer to something they said, so you don’t just look like you’re stalking! 😄 You’re trying to get on their radar and have them follow you, because…

5) You want to be aiming to get into the top 2 sections of the room! You’re much more likely to be invited to speak if you’re followed by one of the speakers and in that middle section.

6) If you want to speak (and that needs to be your aim if you’re in build phase), hit the hand emoji and, if you’re pulled onto the stage, be patient and wait until you’re invited to speak. Do not interrupt.

7) When you get to speak, don’t sell, just give massive value! Get that right and your followers will immediately go up. It’s like going to a speaker event and then following the good presenters on their social channels. Better still, you might be invited to moderate for them in future.

8 ) Start by browsing the ‘hallway’ and looking for smaller rooms on good topics. You’ve a much better chance of being pulled onto stage in a smaller room. The more your reputation and following grows, the better chance you have of being invited to speak in one of the big rooms, which will see your followers growing exponentially.

Tips For Running Your Own Room

1) Don’t go it alone — collaborations rock. Having multiple moderators results in a larger audience AND means you can take a break or have back up in the case of tech gremlins.

2) Schedule your topic in advance and promote, promote, promote. Treat it just as you would a normal event. Build that audience. Clubhouse creates a little preview ‘card’ you can screenshot, plus there’s an option on the event page to auto add to diary AND you can generate a link direct to your room.

3) When running your event, if a big hitter (someone with a good following) joins your audience, immediately bring them up to the stage AND give them moderator rights. Why? Because giving mod rights means CH will ping all their followers and invite them to your room.

4) Encourage your audience to hit the little plus button and invite their own connections into the room.

5) At regular intervals, invite your audience to pull down on the screen to refresh — this helps the CH algorithm see your room is alive and kicking and keeps it showing up and active in the ‘hallway’.

6) At regular intervals, remind your audience to follow others in the room. You might also want to ask them to screenshot the room, post it on their social channels and tag in all the people shown in the room. Promise to go and engage on all the posts you’re tagged into to create mutual support and engagement.

General Tips

1) If you want to ‘applaud’ a speaker and you’re on the stage, you can rapidly tap your microphone icon to make it flash. In some rooms, this means you have something to say, in most it denotes applause/agreement.

2) When you speak, always end by saying your name again and ‘I’ve finished speaking’ or similar. It avoids unwanted interruptions and awkwardness.

3) Make your profile picture pop. If there are lots of speakers, it’s not always obvious whose voice is being heard, so it’s good to be able to verbally tell the audience who you are. Ie: I’m Taz with the pink head. I’ll probably change my profile pic soon, when I’ve had some new ones done… I deliberately chose one I had on file where I could easily create a bright pink background to stand out.

4) Make sure you have your Insta and Twitter accounts connected on your bio. There’s no direct message facility just yet, so most people will DM you via Insta. It’s really good for your Insta following too.

Hope that helps!

See you in Clubhouse. If you’ve found this useful, please do give me a follow (@TazThornton) — happy to follow any of my tribe back if you gimme a nudge.

Taz

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Taz Thornton is the author of Awesome Sauce — a free, weekly positive life and business round-up, with good news stories, positivity tips and visibility hacks for your brand. In a few minutes each week, you get a dose of optimism and some awesome advice to get seen and stay happy.

Taz is a best-selling author, inspirational business speaker and multiple TEDx speaker, consultant on confidence, personal brand and visibility, and an award-winning coach (UK’s Best Female Coach 2018 — Best Business Woman Awards, Female Professional Of The Year, Central England, 2020). She is also the creator of the #UnleashYourAwesome and #BrandMastery personal and business development programmes, as well as #UNLEASHED — an affordable confidence, content and cashflow building programme for coaches, healers and therapists, and #LIFEFORCE — an affordable online spiritual empowerment and coaching programme for people wanting to bring more optimism into their lives.

Taz has been featured on BBC, ITV, in HuffPost, Diva, The Daily Mail and countless other newspapers, magazines and podcasts. Taz is also a regular columnist for the America Out Loud talkshow network. In 2019, she was named as one of the most inspirational businesswomen in the UK and, in 2020, she was named as one of the world’s top 50 women in marketing to follow.

Find her on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Insta, Ko-Fi, Clubhouse and TazThornton.com.