The most popular Video Conferencing app is capable of doing more than you could think. With the ever-growing users in the past few months, Zoom can conduct professional meetings with ease. However, there are a lot of advanced features that are hidden from most of us. Recently I came across some amazing Zoom tips and tricks for professional meetings. They’ll help you conduct conferences with better communication and ethics. Let’s discuss some of them very quickly.
10 Zoom Tips and Tricks for Professional Meetings:
Record the Calls
Yeah, you read it right. Unlike other web conferencing applications, Zoom lets you record your meetings. The recording feature comes in handy when a few attendees missed the meeting. If you’re an artist or speaker, you can watch the conference to review and do better in the upcoming sessions.
You need the Zoom application to record the meeting. If you don’t see the option in ‘Settings’, look for it in the web app in ‘My Meeting Settings’. While recording, you can choose from the options to save the document in local or cloud storage.
Access Attendees’ List
Consider this – you are a college professor or a school teacher who conducts daily meetings with certain people. Thus, you might want to see who attends the class regularly and who doesn’t. Once the meeting is finished, this information is available at easement.
Navigate to Zoom Account Management > Reports > Usage Reports > Meeting. By clicking on Meeting, you can filter the date and report type to proceed. Once done, the report will be generated and ready to download. However, you need to be the host of the meeting or an account admin.
Automate Meeting Schedules
If you do regular online meetings with clients and your team, scheduling Zoom calls automatically will help a lot. It can be done by connecting Zoom to whatever calendar app you use for schedules. The connecting can’t be done directly. Instead, you need a third-party application for it.
Zapier is capable of creating and scheduling a Zoom meeting automatically. Get your hands on Zapier from here and create Zaps for different calendar apps with a couple of clicks.
Plan Recurring Meetings
For daily or weekly meetings, you can schedule recurring meetings. This will give you an upper hand to schedule regular meetings with ease. The option is pretty popular among educational institutions. To plan recurring meetings, navigate to Meetings > My Meetings > Schedule a Meeting > check the Recurring Meeting box.
The same meeting settings will recur every time you start a call. Also, you don’t need to create a new URL every time you call. If you don’t meet them on a fixed time, use the No Fixed Time option. Even the meeting ID will be the same for the attendees.
Collect Attendees’ Information
The personal information of attendees such as their names, industries and email ID is necessary for certain events. If you want this information from attendees, create a registration form. Navigate to My Meetings > Zoom Web App to create a Registration Form. You can now customize and set up the form for attendees to fill before they join the meeting. By default, there are only a few options for the registration form. However, you add more options by clicking the checkboxes.
Draw on the Whiteboard
Apart from sharing your screen for PPTs, you can use the whiteboard pre-installed with Zoom to draw. It can be helpful for teachers to make students learn appropriately. Also, if you’re a designer, creating a sample design using a pencil would do wonders to convince the client. To map out complicated ideas, visuals would do the best work.
Doing a meeting with friends over the next weekend? Let’s play Pictionary and get back our old days with a couple of clicks.
Change the background visuals
How about you enhance your presentation with cool visuals? Well, the trend has changed and people love to be frank even in professional meetings. The most underrated feature of Zoom is Virtual Backgrounds. This is just like using a green screen for creating videos and changing the background.
However, not everyone can do this. You either need a green screen or a strong processor to process it. Thus, if you have one, go ahead and have fun!
EnableDisable Waiting Room
Amidst the Corona Virus pandemic, the user base of Zoom grew exponentially. Thus, users started getting privacy concerns. To tackle the situation, they introduced the privacy-related settings turned on by default. One such great feature is the Waiting Room. This helps you to admit each of the attendees one after the other.
However, if you have plenty of attendees, Waiting Room could be a hassle as you’ll have to allow each of them to enter individually. Thus, you can either enable or disable the feature as per the requirements.
Annotate
Screen sharing has a lot of options to help you enhance the web conferencing experiences. The host of the call can turn on the feature of annotating while watching the screen. It can help the attendees at the meeting to draw and highlight the necessary. This can be handy for people showing graphic designs, mockups, printing samples, etc.
To turn on the Annotate feature while viewing someone else’s screen, navigate to View Option > Annotate. A new toolbar will pop-up with drawing tools such as text, arrow, draw, etc. The host of the call can save these drawings or text for future references.
Co-Host
How about your friend joining in to help you out in pitching the client? Well, you can co-host the Zoom meetings to simplify it. Navigate to My Meetings > Co-Host to start co-hosting the calls with your friend. When you start the meeting, wait for your co-host to join.
Or you can invite them to join by navigating to Manage Participants by clicking on the three dots at the top of the screen. Remember that to co-host a meeting, you need to have a Pro or Business plan for Zoom.
Final Verdict: Is Zoom still the best?
Well, Zoom has not always been on top when we consider web conferencing apps. However, in 2020, they’ve gained an enormous amount of loyal users. With some Zoom tips and tricks for professional meetings, Zoom can be the best option in the market.
What’s your favorite feature while hosting a meeting? Did you find an interestingly hidden feature yet? Do let me know in the comment section below.
If you have any further queries, just drop a comment. I will be happy to help. Do share this post with your friends who are stuck with zoom and want to level up their zoom meetings.
Thank you for reading. I will be back soon with more interesting updates. Don’t forget to join our Telegram Channel for the latest Tech Updates.
Hola! I'm a professional writer who loves to write about technology, marketing, travelling and designing. When I'm not writing, I prefer designing conceptual advertisements for various digital platforms.
