- Zoom, Zoom, Zoom. You don't wanna look like a fool on your next video conference. So in today's video, I'm sharing with you, seven common Zoom mistakes
that you can easily avoid, so you can look so much more professional in your next Zoom meeting. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen
in here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more
done and enjoy less stress. And let's start off with tip number one, and that is do a quick test in advance. I'm just gonna stop sharing my screen here so we can go back into the menu. And even if you started,
you can still do this, but I would recommend
you do this in advance. On your desktop or laptop computer, you wanna open up the Zoom interface. Now, if you're joining a Zoom
meeting on your mobile device, you're probably going
to get a prompt any how to test your video and to test your audio. But here, what we wanna do is open up our Zoom meeting interface and click on the gear
icon, click on settings. And we're gonna look at
two settings very quickly. No joke, I actually do
this every single time. Number one, I click on video. Hey, am in frame? Is the lighting proper? Am I using the correct camera? Because for many of us, we actually have more than one webcam. Your monitor or your laptop, probably already has a webcam built in, but perhaps you're using a
better or higher quality webcam that you attach via USB. So make sure you come down here, make sure that you're
viewing the correct webcam. Now that's a pretty quick and easy one. We also wanna click on the Audio tab and take a look at two
quick things here as well. The first one is test speaker, making sure that you
are hearing the meeting, the way that you want to. In this case, you may have a
variety of different options as to how you can listen to that meeting. For example I typically
take my Zoom calls, using my Bluetooth earbuds and because it's Bluetooth,
these are often connected to a variety of other devices in my home. So I wanna make sure
they're connected properly. What I can also do is select
the Test Speaker icon, (soft music) and make sure that I can
hear what is going on, making sure that I'm hearing that in the device that I want to. I also want to come down to microphone and make sure I've got the
correct microphone selected and I can test that mic as well. Especially if you've invested some money in a better quality microphone, make sure you're using that microphone. By default it may just be
choosing your system's microphone, so yeah, your audience can hear you, but perhaps they're not hearing you in the best all of the quality. So make sure you do a
quick test in advance. Now let's jump back into our Zoom meeting and tip number two has to
do about muting yourself when you don't need to be heard. Now you're probably already familiar with where the mute button is and I can come down here and mute myself so that no one else in
this meeting can hear me. It even gives me a bit of a warning, because it can hear that
I'm talking the moment. But the tip I want to give
you is that if you're involved in a Zoom meeting where
you only need to interject or contribute once in a while, right. You're not the host, you're
not the main presenter, I want you to make use of your Space bar. The Space bar actually acts as a trigger. You can almost think of
it like a walkie talkie where you hold it down and you can speak. So if I press down on my Space bar, I am temporarily unmuted, you can hear me, everyone else can hear me, but as soon as I release that Space bar, I automatically become muted. Take a look here on the
lower left-hand corner, you can see the red slash, I'm muted, but if I press down on the Space bar, now I can ask my question or I can give my comment and
then release that Space bar and I am immediately muted again. So no more worrying,
if people can hear me. Am I muted, am I unmuted? You can use that Space bar so you know when you're pressing it down, you can contribute to that meeting. Tip number three, we're
gonna stick with sound, and this has to do with
sharing your screen in particularly sharing
music or sharing video. How often have you been in a Zoom call and someone has tried
to share a YouTube video or something else with sound. And everyone has to start
pointing at the screen or using private messaging
and saying, we can't hear it. We can't hear it. None of us can hear it. And the host looks a
little puzzled because, they can hear it. They can hear it just perfectly. Why can't everyone else hear it? Well, when you to share
audio or share video, when you select share screen,
before you select that file or before you select your browser, you wanna come down here and make sure you check, share sound. That is the only way that
the audio that you hear on your machine, what you're sharing is going
to be shared with others. And if you are sharing video, you may also want to select
this other option here, optimize for video clip. Meaning it's gonna try and
smooth things over a bit, so it is a better video experience for those who are watching
the video through zoom. But if you are sharing audio, make sure that you select share sound. Now note, this is also
gonna share other sounds on your machine. So if there is going to be an an alert or a notification
or other things that come up, people are going to hear that as well. But this is in particular
if you are sharing that content with other individuals. All right, I'm just gonna
select my browser here. And let's go into share mode
and talk about something which again can really make
a lot of us look foolish, but there's an easy fix for this mistake. Many times we are sharing our
web browser or a web page. So here I am on the Zoom
website and let's say, I want to browse around to
a bunch of different tabs, but by default, the Zoom floating bar, which has all of my controls is anchored at the top of the screen. And you know what, that
makes it really difficult, because if I wanna get to. Oh, I'm trying to get to that tab. And if I wanna get to this tab, as soon as my cursor goes
over there, it comes down. And how many times have
you stopped sharing or maybe hit something up here when you actually meant
to select that tab? Well, the good news is that
you can move that floating bar. If you come up here and
hover over the green, you are screen sharing
area, click and hold, you can actually drag this floating bar to wherever you want. Now, I often like to drag
it to the very bottom of the screen because I don't
have any tabs down there. It's not in the way of anything else. And I can still access it, right? If I come down here, I can hover over and access these controls down below, but now I have full access to
all of my tabs in my browser or if I'm opening a file and
I wanna access all the menu and options up above, nothing
is distracted me in that case. I can always come back and drag it back to the top
or drag it to wherever I want. Now, another option that you have with the floating menu bars. If you come over here to More, you can actually hide these
meeting controls all together. Now you can see they are completely gone. I can't see them at all. And if I press Escape, it
will return to the screen. Now, a bit of a warning because
they're completely hidden, I may end up forgetting
if I'm sharing my screen. And maybe after my portion
of the presentation, I believe I've handed it off to someone else and I'm
not sharing my screen. And then I go to social media or maybe try to do something
else off the side of my desk. Meanwhile, I'm sharing to everyone else. I might forget it. So if I hit Escape, again that floating bar is going to return. But I think one of the nice
things of having this visible at least somewhere on your screen, is you're gonna see this
green, you are sharing and this stop share. The green and the red
makes it pretty apparent that you are sharing in that moment. All right, so the next one on this list is something
really, really important and it's actually
changed in the past year. I've had so many questions about this one. I wanted to make sure I
included it in today's video. What we're gonna do is come up here and open up the chat window. In fact, why don't I just
stop sharing for a moment. I'm gonna have the chat window here on the right hand side. Now, one common mistake
that you want to try and avoid is make sure that
you know the difference between messaging everyone and
messaging someone privately or sending them a direct message. How often have you, or have you seen someone
else send a message when they thought it was directly to an individual, but really it was stuck on everyone and everyone in
the meeting saw that message. So take a quick look
at this dropdown menu. Make sure that you know the difference as to who you're sending that message to. But here's the question
that I got asked last year, when it comes to a direct message and Zoom has changed the label of this. This used to say private, now they use the term direct message. Is it truly private? Can the host truly not see this? Well, it's true in the meeting,
the host cannot see this. The host can not see
any of these messages, but what also used to be true is that if the meeting host was
recording that meeting, they would get a log of the full chat, including
those private messages. So they weren't private afterwards. The host actually could
have access to them. I wanna tell you that that has changed and private
really does mean private. The host does not have
access to those messages even if they are recording the meeting. So something that you
should be aware of there. The other thing I wanna point
out when it comes to chat is that if you are the host, you have a lot more options
available to you here. So for example, by default, most Zoom meetings are set to everyone publicly and directly, meaning that everyone can
message the entire group or they can pick and choose
individuals at a time, but you can disable the directly option and you can choose just everyone publicly. Meaning that every single comment is gonna be to everyone. No one can reach out to
someone on a one-to-one basis. There's two other choices
you should be aware of. Host only, meaning that
participates can only contact you. You can contact everyone else, but only they can ask you questions or send you comments directly. Now, this might be an
interesting one to use if you are a teacher or a trainer and maybe you want to
ensure your participants that they don't need to be
embarrassed about their questions or to ask for help. So in this mode, all of their questions go or
their comments go directly to you and no one else sees them. And of course last but not least, you can just disable chat altogether. You don't always have to
have chat on, but I mean that sort of defeats the
purpose of engagement and allowing people to
interact in another way. Just wanna make sure that you're aware of those options there. Speaking with participants and speaking with having a
little more control as the host, I also wanna make sure that you're familiar with muting everyone in your Zoom meeting. How embarrassing is it that when you are trying to
speak or give a presentation and then you hear someone's
dog barking in the background or perhaps you hear someone
speaking to a spouse off camera? Well, don't forget as the host, you have control, that
power to mute everyone. If we come down here to the
bottom, you can select Mute All. You're gonna get this pop-up window. And just before you say Yes, I want you to look at this option as well, Allow Participants to Unmute Themselves. If you're having a meeting
with a fairly large audience or perhaps a group of people
that you don't know very well, you may want to uncheck this option, meaning that they cannot
unmute themselves, unless you give them access to do so. You get to pick and choose. Now my seventh tip for you has to do with having full control, especially if you want to
prevent your participants from annotating on your screen, prevent them from sharing
their screen, unless you say so and other options. If you're the host, you can come down here to Security and there is a section titled
Allow participants too. So by having share screen unchecked, no one else can share
their screen right now, until I check this, no one else can do so
without my permission. I have chat turned on, but I could turn it off
at this level as well. I can choose to prevent them
from renaming themselves. If I don't want them to
rename themselves something that is already looking
good or I can identify them, I can prevent that as well. I can also, as we just
saw another location where you can prevent them
from unmuting themselves and if you don't want
them to start their video, maybe there's no need
depending on the type of meeting or what you're trying to host, you can also prevent that option as well. Now, if you're looking for an even better way
to engage your audience, you may be interested in learning how to use
Zoom breakout rooms. If so, I invite you to
watch my video down here in the left hand corner. Thank you so much for
watching today's video. I hope you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel and remember being productive
does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
