Ever considered using meetups for business? Meetup.com is a site that is dedicated to creating live face-to-face, personal community-based interactions.
Started right after 9/11, the premise was to give people an opportunity to connect in their communities via meetup groups that you can organize for slightly less than $90 every six months.
For $90 per six months, you get to create 3 groups with different topics and an unlimited number of events per group. These groups are announced to people who are interested in your topics and meetup.com then helps you organize the RSVPs to your events in each group.
Meetup is insistent on the primary principle of creating live, face-to-face meetups or events. Using meetup for business requires you to follow this principle to the letter. You cannot abuse this privilege or you will be prevented from using the platform.
Having said all that, meetup welcomes business people (in most industries – there are exceptions) to participate and create events – as long as they are face to face and abide by their policies.
There are two benefits to meetups for business people. One is obvious – the other a secret to most but probably the most profitable one.
2 Major Benefits of Meetups for Business
- Direct audience gathering – this is what meetup was made for – to accumulate audiences to come and meet or see you present who may be interested in doing business with you at some point.
- Indirect audience gathering – this is the greatest and most profitable secret.
Indirect audience gathering is great on meetup.com because of the fact that Google loves finding content on meetup.com.
Google does not compete with Meetup and vise versa. So it does not mind coming to find content on meetup.com – I don’t have direct evidence of this – but I do see the difference between Google finding content on meetup and my content on Facebook.
Every time you post something on your meetup group or someone RSVPs to an event or posts a comment, it counts to indexing you i.e. your name on Google.
This uplifts your profile online if you are the organizer! What this means is that you are more likely to be found by people searching for your services – because Google loves coming to Meetup to find more content.
Meetup.com is one of those platforms that does not have the mass appeal like Facebook which gives people more enticement to engage because one loves to socialize with the people we know and to frankly find pleasant distraction time away from more suffering tasks like our work or business.
Hence meetup.com does not attract a lot of your competition and remains an affordable option to Facebook advertising for now.
Facebook advertising is in general expensive to work – due to the competition that you must beat in order to get your audience’s attention. Your competition on meetup.com may be non-existent or very small.
We have been organizing meetups for business since 2008 – we are getting about 20 percent of business from the Google improved indexing that we benefit from by using meetup.
Is this something that you would like to benefit from?
Ready to learn more? Contact me or follow me on LinkedIn.
Since 1991, I’ve been reflecting on, designing, and implementing methodologies and systems for bringing a transcendent, creative and innovative approach to critical aspects of entrepreneurship.
