Should Advisors be on Clubhouse?

• This is a live platform where you can congregate and talk with other users. It’s chatty, unlike a Twitter feed where people post things but there’s no way to interact. I’ve seen how responsive people can be to direct messaging over LinkedIn; it does seem like people love to chat back and forth online.

• Clubhouse takes the traditional podcast and makes it interactive. You can freely drop into rooms and chat, or passively listen to a podcast-style lecture given by a moderator with the option to chime in if the moderator “calls on you.”

• The advantage of using a digital audio app is that it is far less production intensive than video. If I want to make a YouTube video, I have to worry about the lighting, the background setting, my hair and makeup, and even if all those elements are working for me, it still might not look good enough.

Shuddering to think what compliance will say

Clubhouse is a compliance nightmare waiting to happen but let’s face it – isn’t everything? Nonetheless, your compliance officer is going to hate it for these reasons.

1. Archiving

You can’t record conversations that happen in Clubhouse. This is a huge stumbling block for compliance. If you want to record the conversation, you have to get everyone’s permission. Given how free form this app is, and how you could have multiple users entering or exiting at any time, it will be impossible to do this.

2. Privacy

This is still in beta form and like any app that has not fully evolved, there are going to be glitches. For example, in February somebody hacked in and started streaming conversations on an outside website. Now, you shouldn’t say anything on these apps that is confidential, but who knows what conversation you’ll get into?

3. Live content

Clubhouse is basically one big live conversation. It’s not like LinkedIn where you can get your post approved three weeks beforehand. Even if you plan out your speech and get your script approved, this leaves the door wide open for you to mess up saying something unplanned on the spot.

To make matters worse, this is unmoderated. If some rogue user comes into the room where you’re chatting and starts firing off crazy comments, there’s nobody to shut it down. There are still only a handful of Clubhouse employees.

Should you be on Clubhouse?

It’s hard to say if you should be on Clubhouse without knowing your overall marketing plan. In my experience, advisors have little time for social media in the first place and have no capacity to be on another app. If you opt for Clubhouse, you curtail participation on other apps. It’s always the quality, not the quantity, of what you put forth on these apps that counts.

There may be perks to being on Clubhouse before it gets too crowded. Being an early user may enable you to build a larger following in the absence of the noise that the herd brings.

If you do decide to go with Clubhouse, as with anything you do on social media, my advice is:

• Be sincere and create genuinely meaningful content.

• Purposefully target a niche or a particular type of user instead of trying to be all things to all people.

• Bring some value to everyone you interact with instead of pumping them with meaningless, self-serving garbage (no matter how good it looks).

• Funnel your contacts from the app onto your newsletter list.

Sara’s upshot

I’m sticking to LinkedIn for now and, if you are too, my book, 47 Financial Advisor LinkedIn Messages, will teach you how to maximize engagement on LinkedIn messenger. Or, if you need social media coaching, please contact me about joining the waitlist for my membership program.

Sara Grillo, CFA, is a marketing consultant who helps investment management, financial planning, and RIA firms fight the tendency to scatter meaningless clichés on their prospects and bore them as a result. Prior to launching her own firm, she was a financial advisor.

Sources

Curry, David. BusinessofApps. (10 March, 2021). Clubhouse Revenue and Usage Statistics (2021). Retrieved on March 22nd, 2021 from https://www.businessofapps.com/data/clubhouse-statistics/

Influencer MarketingHub. Clubhouse Statistics: Revenue, Users and More (2021)

Retrieved on March 22nd, 2021 from https://influencermarketinghub.com/clubhouse-stats/

Pritchard, Tom. Tomsguide. Clubhouse app hacked and audio reposted for all — what you need to know. Retrieved from https://www.tomsguide.com/news/clubhouse-app-hacked-and-audio-reposted-for-all-what-you-need-to-know

Read more articles by Sara Grillo