Zoom easily becomes a household name during the pandemic. It’s now the most preferred video conferencing platform. I bet you have attended a Zoom meeting at least once or even hosted one.

Zoom meetings and webinars are everywhere from family and friends get together, online classes to a large, multi-day, multi-speaker virtual conference.

Most of the time people don’t care to explore and take time to check the features of Zoom as long as they can easily join and start a meeting.

This is going to be exciting whether you are a plain attendee, regularly host a meeting, or are a seasoned presenter. You’ll surely have some fun playing and getting yourself around with these top features of Zoom.

Waiting Room

Zoom is strengthening its security especially due to several incidents of “Zoom-Bombing”. Zoom-bombing happens when individuals gate-crash Zoom meetings. These uninvited guests share their screens or even use a virtual camera to bombard the participants with disturbing content.

One way to make sure this will be avoided is to enable the waiting room. As the host or co-host, you can see the list of people in a waiting area and you have the option to admit and let them join the meeting. The nice thing about waiting rooms is that you can customize them. This is what the people in the waiting room will be seeing.

Meeting Reactions

A great way to engage participants in a Zoom meeting is to enable the meeting reactions and non-verbal feedback. You can ask for feedback and know what they’re feeling from the reactions. Once enabled, the meeting participants can use the 6 standard meeting reaction emojis.

Zoom also provided lots of addition to their reaction options.

Polls

Another way to engage the participants in a Zoom event is through the polls. The polling feature allows creating single or multiple-choice questions. You can launch the poll during the meeting or webinar. To enable the polling feature, toggle the polling option in the Meeting tab within the Account Settings.

This can be a very fun way to engage the participants. You can ask simple questions like what they eat for breakfast or how are they feeling today.

Breakout Rooms

This is an awesome feature of Zoom in which the host/ co-host can launch private rooms within the main room. This is like creating smaller groups out of the participants in the main hall and assigning them to different rooms.

Participants can have discussions separate from the main room. This is best for sharing ideas and planning sessions.

You can also utilize breakout rooms when you have multiple speakers. By creating different breakout rooms for the multiple speakers, the participants can choose which speaker to attend to. In this way, you can produce a multi-speaker conference doing simultaneous presentations.

To enjoy this amazing feature, you have to enable the breakout rooms in the meeting tab.

Chat

Zoom offers the ability to chat with everyone in the meeting or send a direct message to one participant. The in-meeting chat feature of Zoom can be used to share links or even files during the meeting.

For those camera-shy and not confident to turn on their microphone, they can easily interact in the chat. When facilitating a meeting or webinar, maximize the chat feature for participant engagement.

Screen Sharing

Another great Zoom feature is screen sharing. If you’re a speaker or presenter, you can easily share your slides by sharing your screen or a portion of the screen. This is also a great feature when you’re on a dual monitor. Aside from sharing your screen or slides, you can also have fun by sharing sounds and videos.

In our next blog, we will be writing an in-depth discussion on advanced screen sharing. Make sure not to miss it!

Now that we have shared with you the top features of Zoom, we are excited for you to host your virtual event. This can bring your Zoom event to the next level.

Zoom’s Top Features You Shouldn’t Miss