Hello everyone and welcome to the Keep Productive YouTube channel on today's
video we are looking into Twist, the team communication tool developed by Doist
We're going to be looking into the features the thoughts on the
application from using it for about two or three months now and also looking
into the pricing and information that you need to know to make that decision
- whether this is your team communication tool so guys let's dive in
so guys today's video we are looking into twist this is twist in front of us
Twist touts fewer notifications now what twist does aside from some of
the other applications is to improve team communication by reducing it
actually making it more precise precisely at the word precise and
meaningful so what I will be doing in this review is kicking things off with
the features I think some of the features are pretty impressive I'll be
giving you my thoughts on each of the features and how we've used them in
practice and hopefully that should give you a nice outline so the first of those
features is threads now threads essentially is the way to communicate
inside of twist so you do have channels on this left-hand side but channels act
almost as topic so for example if we clicked on general we'd see all of the
threads that were started inside of general the same with the podcast the
things that are relevant to here too and also YouTube these are the areas that we
work on at the moment now if I go up to inbox essentially inbox is where any new
threads are coming in so that you can almost keep a tap on what you need to
reply to and it's quite a nice way to actually view all of your threads and I
found it a good way on mobile especially to view all of that there now you do
have start in case you have any conversations that specifically need to
be favorited or important and you can do that by going to the top right hand
corner and starring it and a star will appear on that left hand side now
threads are really easy to start so for example what we do in our team is we
start a thread pretty much whenever there's a new article to be created and
what makes that different from our experience on slack is that when we were
creating articles on smack we're just chatting about it in a group but whereas
with this we've actually so for example we're doing a feature on to do as karma
explained Alice is writing this one when we post that title in the thread we are
actually being a bit more definitive and what we're talking about in this
conversation although this conversation did spiral into talking about whether
we're working at the weekend but you can see what we've done here the goal is to
be a bit more clear and focused on what
we're actually writing about and the issue at hand so that's one of the ways
that it differs from slack if I press start a new thread up here you can see
that I can choose the actual channel that I post in so I can go to podcast or
YouTube in this case I'll go YouTube and you can see that it brings you to that
channel in case and you can invite team members specifically to those channels
so they don't get the notifications but you can see here that when you're about
to post you get to choose who you notify in this case I might just notified Diana
if I press ENTER she will be the only one notified so that Alice won't get any
of those too many messages or threads in her inbox now it's very similar to
creating an email inside of twist all you do is give it a title so for example
you could say thumbnail for video on bullet journal so and then you can start
composing your message below now there are a few obviously a media attachments
you can use at the bottom you can attach anything there that's relevant you can
add any markdown as well so markdown is available there and any emojis that you
see fit in the conversation and so for example I'm going to say could we put
together a thumbnail for the boo Joe feature on that notion and what I'll do
I'm all for writing if I click post thread and once that's posted you can
see a conversation has been started now you can obviously comment and once you
comment what's quite exciting is if you wanted to bring in someone else to a
conversation say for example I'm like okay Alice is now needs to be involved
in this conversation you can do that or and you can even delete the original
person so that you're notifying only the people that matter and that will really
produce better results so you can see here that if I go on to each of the
posts I have you can add a reaction message you can see who that who's been
notified per one and you can even edit it there in the top right hand corner
you can mark as unread you can star a thread
you can edit the thread title if you want to if that changes you can even add
two todoist we're doing a feature on that tomorrow or Sunday I think it is
and you can get these read by email you can copy a link to the thread and move
it to another area if you wanted so for example if we're like ok actually this
is more suitable for the website you can drag that thread into the website area
and at the top that shall appear so it's quite a nice way of being able to
interact and the great thing is I will be able to see all of Diana's or Alice's
messages below here so the only other thing to note is that you've got the
ability to edit the channel you can get email to this channel and copy the link
to the channel as well as leave and archive it and if you want to find any
archived channels you can find them here we don't have any at the moment because
we've only been using it for two or three months now now one of my favorite
things I would say is composing those threads because they're very clear and
focused whereas previously we didn't like we were just more chatting about it
and you know we can close a thread once each piece had been done which is quite
nice so the other thing you've got is messages up here messages are a way to
organize your conversations individually so if I wanted to start a message with
Alice you could see that I started this conversation here and that's synchronous
so you can see when people were typing and you can see that inside of threads
too but that's a good way if you want to have a if we want to have a direct
conversation now also you've got team so you can see who's in our team and their
status so for example I've put a vacation reminder here on four until
Monday so I'll be off from Monday but this is a good way in actually seeing
what the statuses of all the team Alice is on a break to but she should have put
it on there which I'll tell her to do but worry a small team so we pretty much
remember all this stuff so that's how to view the team and search is quite
accessible and you can go really into detail if you want to just search
threads only and from specific people like I could search thread only from
Alice to me or Francesco and with the jacked off Trello for example and if I
search that they're obviously no terms for that at the moment so if I go back
to the threads here that's it's pretty much the outline of the experience it's
really optimized for remote teams and that's one of the benefits of using it
it tries to keep asynchronous communication as the sort of pinpoint so
that you don't all have to be bombarded with messages now I will show you a few
of the future sense that they've got so your features over here you can see your
account information as well as add a lovely photo you can access your
password as well as notification settings what appears on your mobile and
email I know that if I'm away from twist it will email me now with any threads or
messages if I've missed any which is quite nice I quite like that because I
know that I'm gonna get an email with anything I missed and it reminds me to
check it now the great thing it's not a twist is you've got the ability to
access time off you can schedule time off and you can even edit it if you're
on sick leave or paid leave or whatever so it's it's good if you've got a big
team you can go to that team area and see visually exactly who's on break soon
and it gives you a bit of sort of pre warning to some extent about what's
coming up so from using this application maybe for the last two three months I
would say that it's been pretty impressive we have been I would say a
lot calmer in our communication in terms of like when we're doing this daily
we're not just like bombing messages on slack we're very clear and concise about
what we're talking about which is quite nice and when we're working on pieces
for example if we leave those article titles up there we can go back to them
and just start that conversation again now the things I would like to see some
additional things is the ability to press enter on when you type in one here
I think that's probably accessible in settings somewhere but for example when
I'm typing a message just press ENTER and it posts that comment I don't think
that's available now also text formatting you've got only if you
obviously got a sort of key down here of be able to see the markdown and you can
learn markdown pretty fast I know it but I would like to see some sort of text
formatting added that I think this application will be
great for internal wiki's internal wiki's are getting more popular and this
left-hand side I reckon it'd be cool to be able to see posts on all of the stuff
that you need to know so when you're joining twist you actually see all the
information you need to know at a glance onboarding for employees etc but again
these are just feature requests and things that I've noticed but I really
have enjoyed the experience so far and I know that Alison and Diana have felt the
same in terms of being a bit more freer with their communication on here so as
you can imagine pricing let's give you a bit of an outline on pricing pricing is
for example we're using the free plan which is zero dollars forever
you've got search for up to one month you've got the up to five integrations
so we can connect out we've got to do is connecting up and you've also got five
gigabytes of total storage we've got custom channels and also guest access as
well as all of the access so for example on Mac Windows iOS Android and web to
access twist which is good now there is a $5 annual fee if you want to go to
unlimited so you can get unlimited search unlimited integrations I think I
will post all of the information here and that's per user per month if you go
for the annual fee you get two months free so it's $60 for the year if you go
for the monthly one per user it's six dollars per month now of course you can
if you went from unlimited free you would get history all stored so that
won't go away and you can have guest access via the free plan so guys
hopefully I give you a nice outline to twist again will probably be reviewing
it in the next couple of months giving you a bit of an outline to how we've
developed with the application a couple of recommended resources twists have a
couple of useful articles that might help you with team communication on
their blog on duyst blog and also Mike said Pierre Pierre has a great feature
here on YouTube that Dan's outlined the application if you want a
bit more details than just what I gave anyway guys hopefully that gave you a
nice insight to this application this video was commissioned mine doest just
to let you know they have sponsored this month here
the key productive YouTube channel and it's great to have them but again all of
these thoughts are my own so I just wanted to share some of my opinions on
Twist so far and we're going is a huge thank you for stopping by today I hope
you enjoyed this video leave a like if you enjoyed it subscribe if you're brand
new comment with any thoughts on team communication applications at the moment
and the guys pew thanks and I'll see you guys very soon