Although the popular audio chat platform Clubhouse today includes a way to share your upcoming hangouts and events across social media, the resulting link that displays is fairly boring. A new link-sharing tool called ClubLink can help. The tool allows hosts to better promote their events by offering a more customized social media preview featuring a photo that includes the room name, who’s attending, the date and time (using the host’s time zone) and even profile icons of the hosts themselves.
The tool was built by two Germany-based colleagues, online marketer Jens Polomski and coder and digital marketer, Peter Thaleikis.
Polomski says he came up with the idea last month because he kept seeing Clubhouse links shared on Twitter and thought they just didn’t look that good.
“I noticed many people share — especially on Twitter — because Clubhouse has this built-in sharing feature,” he says. “But the preview image is not well-optimized and lacks any relevant information.”
Polomski reached out to Thaleikis and convinced him to help build a better version.
Their resulting ClubLink tool is simple to use. You just paste in your Clubhouse event link on the ClubLink website, and it automatically generates the ClubLink you can use. It’s a similar process as to how URL shorteners like tinyurl.com work, for example.
Image Credits: ClubLink
In ClubLink’s case, though, it’s doing a bit more than just returning a shorter URL. The tool visits the Clubhouse link provided and takes a screenshot to help create the image — but it’s not scraping data from Clubhouse, Polomski says. The tool also renames the image file it creates to include the host’s name for better discoverability and, perhaps, for better search engine optimization in the future.
In fact, the SEO aspects of the ClubLink URLs were considered when the tool was built, given its creators have digital marketing backgrounds.
“We’re taking care that the technical SEO background from the links are as good as possible — and that’s something Clubhouse, right now, didn’t do,” notes Polomski. However, he notes that it’s too soon to tell how well those efforts have paid off, as the first ClubLink URLs were just launched last week and only a few have been indexed by Google so far.
After you’ve created the link on the ClubLink website, you’re directed to a page where you have the option to immediately share it out to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Being able to publicize your rooms in advance is a important way to build a following on the audio-based social network, so likely many hosts will begin to put this new tool to use in the days ahead.
Here’s one example of a ClubLink in action:
THIS FRIDAY ON CLUBHOUSE…
Geekout Weekly
Join me + friends to discuss ALL the week's biggest social media news, updates, and platform features
More info: https://t.co/82nkYItqAk
— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) February 9, 2021
Of course, sharing a link while you’re in a room is useful too — especially if you’ve landed in a great room you think others should know about. Clubhouse, in its most recent update, noted that you’re now able to click the “+” sign while in a room to get a link that you can post to social media. Unfortunately, these “room” links don’t work yet in the ClubLink tool, but the team said they’re already discussing a solution for that.
ClubLink is one of now several small tools that’s popped up in recent days to offer expanded functionality and new features for Clubhouse power users.
We’ve also come across the Clubhouse Bio Creator at clubhousebio.xyz, which helps people perfect their profile bio on the desktop, then copy it over to Clubhouse on their phone. Other popular tools help users make their profile picture stand out, like Clubhouse Glow, Clubhouse Avatar Maker and Thriveepic‘s Canva template.
