I know you may have been using social media for quite some time but there are a few items you must understand in order to make the best of any social platform you may use.

1. Social Media Is a Popularity Contest

This is a fact that many people don’t understand, but we all have been a part of popularity contests throughout our lives. The president, governor, and mayor all depend on a vote of the highest number of supporters or “followers”. The popular girls, the pretty girls, the mean girls, and even the high school hunks all became who they were in your high school days because of the people who followed them.

Social media, at its bleak core, is a popularity contest for restless egos. The idea is we submit material to websites that other people can see and use their reaction to it to gauge our approval levels. … We can count those likes for an idea of how well we are doing in the pursuit of likeability (Scottish Daily Mail 2017).

2. A “Like” or a “Follow” is Social Media Currency.

Facebook had a problem with its platform early on where people were not engaging. They would simply say “I like this” or some variation of it. Facebook then came with a solution called the “like” button.

Research would find that engagement shot up, and Facebook decided the Like button could also be used to rank popular posts higher on the Facebook newsfeed as a “vote”. Zuckerberg agreed that it was a hit, and on February 9, 2009, the Like button was officially launched sitewide.

Facebook’s Likes immediately became popular, but people weren’t just using it to share their thoughts on posts and videos. Acquiring lots of Likes became a way for users to distinguish their internet worth from someone else’s.

3. The “Like” button and “Follow” count ain’t goin nowhere!

The day in 2019 when Facebook and its sister platform Instagram announced they were testing whether they should hide Likes, social media platforms were sent into an uproar.

In 2019 Instagram and its partner platform Facebook decided they would hide social media likes. This sent a shock through many of the platforms celebrities, influencers, and many others who had used the “Like” and “Follow” as currency to show clout on the platforms.

These naysayers stated that they based their livelihood on these likes as verified metrics to potential businesses on how much “like” currency they could get on a post.

4. ClubHouse Has No “Like” Button… But it has an “I Like You” Button and its called “Follow”.

Understanding social media is understanding the currency used to fuel the algorithms that power the platforms. Facebook used the “Like” button, Instagram has the “Love” and Clubhouse has the “Follow”.

The follower count determines in the mind its users who has clout on the platform. ClubHouse has stated that this information is used by the algorithm to determine who has been on the platform and providing the most value or should we say… becoming the most popular?

There are those that are brought on stage and are truly adding value, and then there are the long-winded types who feel the longer they speak the more people have time to find them on the stage and give them the currency of ClubHouse… the “follow”.

5. If you create a room and have no followers no one will see your room.

If you have 50 followers then you have 50 people that may potentially see your room and join in. This holds true if and only if they are online while your room is open, and of course, if they are not already in a room, see a better room before seeing your room, don’t like your room topic, or don’t like you anymore and so on but the list goes on.

Summary: You need topic-relevant followers or others with topic-relevant followers on your stage speaking.

6. ClubHouse likes big stages

ClubHouse said themselves the platform likes bigger stages for bigger rooms. This will notify followers of speakers on your room’s stage a room has begun.

Summary: Bringing more People to your stage gets you more people seeing your room which has the potential to lead to bigger rooms (unless your topic sucks). So don’t just leave people in the audience… bring them into the conversation to speak.

7. Make Sure Your Followers are relevant or you will be irrelevant.

If your room is about making good hickory-smoked Texas Barbecue, be sure “Your” followers you bring to the stage are not Vegan unless you want a bunch of vegans in your audience telling you how bad you are for eating animals.

Still don’t get it? Make sure “Your” followers care about what “You” are talking about otherwise your 10,000 followers will mean nothing if they could care less about your great Texas Barbecue recipes.

Summary: You can have 30,000 followers who don’t eat meat and if you are trying to sell steaks in your room… umm.. yeah good luck with that.

8. Bigger is better…Unless we are talking about ClubHouse Clubs

There are ClubHouse Clubs that have huge numbers but do not produce large rooms. Why is this? ClubHouse began where the Club owner’s primary focus was getting large numbers of people to join the club not large members of people who actually cared about the topics the club would be presenting. These owners of these clubs did not focus on creating relevant content for their club followers, leading to their followers leaving the platform, or never attending rooms created by the club.

I have seen clubs that have 40k members with only 350 members online (thats less than 1%). Here you can see there are a ton of members in the club but only a tiny bit of potential room attendees. I have also witnessed smaller clubs with as little as 4000 members having as many as 700 members online. That’s almost 10 percent! Remember percentages matter.

Summary: You can have 100k members in your club with 50 people online means your club participation will still will still be much lower than expected.