We’re in the age of online and remote work now, and even with pandemic fears easing, it doesn’t look like that’s going to change. Even if you don’t work from home or from another remote location, however, you’ve probably used one of the many video meeting platforms that have become popular in recent years. That means you know how much of a time-sink these live meetings can be, or how they can yank you away from your work at the worst times. Enter Loom, a cloud-based, asynchronous, video messaging service that lets you enjoy the convenience of digital communication without eating away at your time.
Unlike reading email chains and endless chats, video is inherently more human, personal, and expressive. Video is also more efficient than text communication when it comes to pitching ideas, hashing out complex concepts, coordinating team projects, brainstorming, and other group-oriented activities. But live video meetings can seem like a chore after a while and often pull you out of your work right when you’ve hit a nice groove. Video calls also often drag on longer than necessary, and can get crowded (with the old “too many cooks in the kitchen” conundrum rearing its head). This is a particular challenge when you need to keep a large number of people in the loop for cross-functional projects.
Loom provides the human expression of live interaction, but a new level of increased flexibility and efficiency. Its simple recording tool lets you and your colleagues record videos and instantly share them with each other. How it works is pretty straightforward: You simply record your screen or your camera (or both at the same time), and your video is uploaded to the cloud. All you need to do is send the instantly created link to teammates or others. This is especially useful for things like product demos or onboarding new colleagues, as you don’t have to hold multiple video calls to iterate the same points and ideas again and again.
Loom has some other cleverly useful features as well. Perhaps one of the biggest time-wasters during live video meetings is dead air and filler words — “um,” “uh,” “like,” “right,” “you know” — we’re all guilty of using them, and while it’s not a huge deal in day-to-day conversation, it can quickly become a drag during video conferences held during busy work hours. With Loom, you can automatically trim these filler words with the press of a button. The app goes through your recorded footage, detects filler words, and cuts them out, which saves time for you as well as for your teammates who will be watching the video. Loom even creates transcripts and adds closed captioning to videos. This improves accessibility, and also creates instant, shareable notes from every video.
One of the most valuable aspects of using Loom is that it allows you to record, send, review, and respond to videos at your leisure and as your schedule allows. This is comparable in some ways to the convenience of text messages, which you can send and reply to at your convenience, as opposed to live calls for which you must drop what you’re doing and focus all of your attention on (taking up valuable work time and more than likely disrupting your workflow). But since Loom is a full-featured video service, you still get all the fun, personality, and in-depth communication that video footage delivers — elements you lose in texts and emails.
It’s easy to install and use Loom, too. You can do so via the Loom desktop client, Chrome browser extension, or Android and iOS mobile apps. More than 14 million professionals around the world have already made the jump, and if you sign up now through Digital Trends, you can take advantage of a 14-day Loom free trial. During this two-week free trial period, you can enjoy an unlimited number of creator seats (meaning anybody on your team can record and send videos), unlimited video cloud storage, and no recording length limits. That’s along with Loom’s other great features, including transcriptions, closed captioning, and one-click filler word removal.
