Perhaps Zoom has become so popular during this COVID 19 season where everyone is staying home and Businesses especially needed to connect virtually with employees and clients while working from home. This obviously couldn’t be achieved on Social Media.
This was where Zoom came into the picture more aggressively. They provide one of the most reliable and affordable video conferencing and virtual meeting platforms in the world now.
In this Tip article, we will go through how to create a zoom account, set up a meeting and invite friends or clients and also look at video control and other basic tools that are available to your disposal. This process applies to both the web interface and the mobile app.
Setting Up Your Zoom Account:
As with any other online platform registration, this is equally pretty simple and straight forward. Since Zoom has pricing packages (the platform is not entirely free), we will for the sake of this article look at the free version. The free version comes with up to 100 participants in one call, with an unlimited one to one session with just 40minutes of chat time.
1. Once you hit the signup button from the top right corner, you would have begun the registration process. Simply enter and email and desired password to continue. You can equally use Facebook or Google to create an account.
2. Activate your account by clicking on the link sent to the email you used during sign up.
3. Once your account is activated, you will then see ‘Schedule A Metting’, ‘Join A Meeting’ and ‘Host A Meeting’
4. You can schedule a meeting and share the link ahead of time by going to the ‘Schedule A Metting’ section. You will then be asked for the basic details of the meeting such as the name, time for the meeting, description, and other reasonable basic information regarding the upcoming meeting you’re scheduling. The link to the meeting and the password will be generated immediately you are done.
5. In hosting a zoom call, I will, first of all, recommend you install the Zoom software on your Laptop or phone. Download the Zoom software on your Laptop HERE. This helps to easily host or join a meeting. As I said earlier concerning Scheduling a meeting, when you are hosting a meeting too, you can invite participants via the meeting’s URL. You can either send this automatic meeting URL and password to them via email or through WhatsApp. You will be notified once someone joining the meeting.
Meeting Control Tools
At the bottom dark area of the software as indicated above, every participant has the opportunity to control their input.
1.Audio & Video: You can actually mute you own the audio from your end but still could hear others. This is very good especially when you’re not making a submission and you probably are in a noisy environment. Same applies to the Video side, ones these two are crossed out with the red line, it means you are not transmitting and if they’re not crossed, you are live with Audio and Video
2. Share Screen: Again from the picture above, the share screen is self-explanatory. This enables you to share your screen by selecting a particular window that you have opened on your pc. It could be a browser page, a word document, excel document ect, this basically shares everything from your laptop screen. It works as it says. When you are done sharing, you can ‘Stop Share’ from the bottom.
3. Chat: This allows you to share information in a written form with everyone or with just one person. Since you are the host of the meeting, you can disallow everyone from using the chat system
4. Record: Finally, you can record the conversation from start to finish to your computer and it will do just that.
