Introduction

Meetup.com is a service that allows people of all types, whether they are business owners, entrepreneurs, or average people, to organize or attend online and in-person events with others of similar interest through their website.

In a previous blog post, I touched on some of the downsides to using Meetup in my opinion as someone who has used it as an Event Organizer as well as an attendee.

In this blog post, I want to review reasons to use Meetup from the perspective of a business owner or entrepreneur eager to expand their reach and online visibility.

So let’s get started!

Reasons to Use Meetup If You’re a Business Owner or Entrepreneur

Whether you are a profitable business owner already or a entrepreneur trying to increase online visibility, boost your own website Search Engine Optimization, or connect with new audiences, Meetup can help you accomplish those goals in multiple ways.

Connect with Others

Meetup is an efficient tool for helping you connect to others locally, who may be ideal customers for your type of business. You would get started doing this by first deciding if you want to attend local events in-person or online. That decision would then inform whether you need a special, paid account as an Event Organizer or as a attendee which is free. As an Event Organizer, you’d pay a monthly or annual fee so you can then create several groups, which could have online events, in-person physical events, or a combination of those.

You could create as many events as you want, promote these events as often as you’d like through all social media outlets, using different descriptions each time along with different hashtags, mention them in podcast interviews or events, blog about the events and cross-pollinate (cross-promote and advertise) content creation to your groups as well as activities in enrolling new group members. So you’d create content to appeal to potential customers who might make for active group members who could either contribute or take action in your groups activities or as a customer at some point, circulate that through social media channels, that would fit one of the three unique silos of marketing content I’ve written about in a separate blog post.

Now, if you’re only interested in attending events, whether they are online or in-person, Meetup can still help you along that route. In this instance, you’d sign up for a free account, look for the type of local groups you’d want to join based on subject matter interests, create a profile you’d like others to see and represent you, add social media links, add an introduction, and get started finding groups that seem active and with regular events. Some groups seem to be “ghost” groups that don’t have regularly recurring events or much activity, so the more you sign up for the more likely you are to find activities along specific interests.

Meetup and SEO

Keep in mind that if your goal is to attend online, virtual, or remote events only and you are receptive to attending these online events in different time zones and in different areas of the country or even the world, you’ll have to do some detective work using Meetup’s search function.

As it’s currently set up as of this writing, most search results from Meetup will only display events and groups that are in your own specific local area city and state or zip code only. So for example, if I live in Brooklyn, New York, and I look for online events and groups in Meetup search results, it’s very likely only to show me events in Brooklyn, New York. It may display results in other areas of New York, or in other neighborhoods or in surrounding areas, but it’s highly unlikely to show groups or events that are online, that you could attend, that are…say, in other US states such as Virginia, Idaho, or Miami.

So the only way you’d find these events, event though they are online and you could possibly attend them even though they may have differing time zones, would be to go back to the search box, change your location to a specific city in each state, and then see what becomes available.

For each state, you’d have to enter a different city and state. If you wanted to look up only online events across the world, for example, that’s just not available at the time of this blog post (hopefully they’ll add this function one day). For any different country, you’d have to start over again with a specific city, borough, province, and / or state.This makes search more time-consuming, difficult, and less effective, but as the saying goes, “it is what it is.”

The Value of Reaching Others

Now the value of reaching others, whether it’s online or in-person (which is of course a personal decision given the COVID situation in much of the world), is that of being able to network remotely with new people and business owners you might not otherwise ever interact with and being able to do so from the comfort and safety of your own home, being able to share content and marketing collateral with others, share your social media accounts with others and whatever you may distribute through those, and if you’re an Event Organizer, that value is amplified considerably in that now you basically can create three groups in different cities, states, or other areas around the planet where you could host events, teach workshops, offer free giveaways, promote newsletters or special offers to members, charge for events or workshops and pretty much do whatever you’d like in terms of marketing and business promotion as long as it is within Meetup’s code of conduct and not so spammy as to drive members running for the proverbial hills.

Meetup allows Event Organizers to pay for membership monthly or annually, so even if an event doesn’t attract many attendees, you can always cancel or suspend paid membership, conversely you can change questions and more effectively screen those who sign up to join, you can turn down potential members on the basis of questionnaire answers (an example would be if they are not actively engaged in social media if you had a marketing group), set groups to be private and only visible to a select few, offer polls, have online chat conversations, create pages for your group’s activities or features, and include videos and other links.

Conclusion

As a marketing tool for an existing, structured business, Meetup can definitely help you connect to more potential customers. Imagine if a local doctor hosted a Meetup group to answer health-related questions or concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic, or a local HVAC company who hosted a local Meetup group to answer questions or address common concerns, or a lawyer whose group discussed specific legal matters in broad contexts, or even a local baker who hosted a online cooking lesson group or a local restaurant who hosted a local Meetup group to showcase and discuss cooking, cooking classes, recipes, discuss cookware. The opportunities for promotion and cultivation ultimately are limited only by your imagination, capability, and desire to grow.

In some cases, it could take several weeks or even several months for a group to catch on and build membership, so it’s important to examine other similar groups locally as well as nationally to gauge interest and involvement, study how they represent themselves online, what content they offer publicly as opposed to privately once someone is a member, whether or not to charge for some events and perhaps not others, and get used to the Meetup system and options. Certainly, in the past I’ve used Meetup to generate considerable sums of revenue by offering online and in-person digital marketing, WordPress, SEO, eCommerce, and related workshops; but it’s with the caveat that some events or groups didn’t take off as I’d have hoped, while others did very well. Timing and scheduling also often played a role in attendance, as did location if the event was in-person, so these are also important factors to consider. Meetup can help you grow your business if used properly and with a little luck.