Twist brings a truly different team communication style to the table. It doesn’t let the team members become weary of real-time interactions. Learn how to communicate effectively with your team on Twist.
What Is Twist?
Twist is a free work messaging tool with a threaded view of team conversations in dedicated channels. It doesn’t burden your workday with real-time communications yet keeps you updated on all aspects of tasks and projects.
This team collaboration tool creates opportunities for more focused work. Twist lets you pick the low-hanging fruit for productivity improvement: focused work. If your team increases the volume of focused work per day, project productivity will also go up.
Its communications modules like Threads, Channels, Inbox, and Messages create the perfect ambiance for productive work while keeping everyone in the loop without the pressure of real-time engagement.
Download: Twist for Windows | macOS | Linux | Android | iOS (Free)
1. Twist Teams and Groups
A Twist team includes all of the members of a specific project. It organizes the project members to keep everyone connected. You can create different groups within a team.
Therefore, one team member can be a part of different groups within a project team. For example, developers, content creators, social media, and webmasters, could be individual teams.
However, one or more members from these teams could be in different groups like UI/UX designing, blogging, digital marketing, backend troubleshooting, and so on.
Groups within a team further organize your team members on a micro-level. Twist lets you create groups in many ways, and some of these are:
Groups by sales, support, or development team. Groups by region like APAC, EMEA, AMER, and so on. Groups by blog, event, new launch, or design project. Groups by topics like smart devices, Windows, macOS, and many more.
2. Team Channels
In a project team, there could be hundreds of discussions on a variety of topics, bottlenecks, schedules, and bugs. Twist enables you to organize all of such discussions in channels.
Channels consist of broad topics. You need to add your client, collaborator, or team members to the relevant channels. You can add a channel name and description so that guests or members can easily identify the scope of the channels.
Channels let your team members fetch vital information about work without wasting time on searching. You get access to all public channels after joining a Twist team.
You can go through the channel list and join the ones you need for work. Twist admins can also create private channels. Private channels won’t be visible to everyone. You can only join a private channel if you get an invite from the admin.
3. Threads and Messages
Threads or threaded discussions are the new way of focused communication. You can create different threads for a variety of conversations.
Your client, team members, or guest collaborators can add texts, files, and pictures within any threaded conversation. Users can also forward certain emails from their email inbox to Twist threads.
You can effortlessly locate any information or file from a thread as threads are systematically organized within the team and team’s channels. You can easily add team members in your threads to notify them about new discussions or policies.
Thread creator, team admin, or members can move the thread between channels. However, Twist won’t let you move the threads across teams.
Though Twist lets you focus on asynchronous communication, it has real-time messaging too. You can send a text to one or many from the Messages section. You can also send links, photos, and other project files. Messaging has built-in integration for file hosting servers like OneDrive, Dropbox, and Google Drive.
4. Commenting and Reactions
Once you’ve created a new thread, everyone can start commenting there. You’ll see the Reply section at the bottom of the thread. Comments allow you to tag a specific team member or all of the users in the thread.
Commenting also introduces a new communications feature, the Quick actions. Quick actions can let you mention someone in the thread or refer to the conversation in a thread or channel. You can also edit or delete your comments whenever you need to.
Twist has a decent library of funny and engaging emojis. You can use these to show your reaction to any message or threaded conversation.
5. Powerful Notifications
Twist gently reminds you of any comments and messages through notifications. You have total control to configure the notifications on Twist. Personalize your notification settings to stay focused during deep work.
There are various notifications settings available to Twist users. Some of the vital notification settings are:
Notification for All threads and messages Threads only let you know exclusively about new threads @Mentions only notifies you if someone tags you in a thread
You can also schedule Snooze settings for the entire week for notification-less time slots. The app won’t send you any notifications. As soon as the scheduled period lapses, you’ll get to see the latest updates.
6. Forward Emails to Twist
Twist is not only a team communications app. You can do a lot of content management, project management, and file sharing on this app. You can forward work-related files and conversations to Twist via email forwards. There are dedicated Twist email addresses for each of your groups and threads.
You’ll find the email address by clicking on the ellipses of any group or thread. If you forward an email to a thread, the email content will show up as a comment. Then again, if you send an email to a Twist group, you’ll see a new thread has popped up.
7. Automation and Integrations
You can extend Twist’s scope of use by integrating it with your favorite work apps. At present, the app can integrate with up to 28 platforms. You can integrate Twist with Google Drive for file sharing, Calendly for calendar management, Asana for project management, and so on.
You can use the Zapier integrations to automate your team communications in Twist. There are also other automation integrations for Twist like Team Check-In and Auto-reports.
Remote Team Communication at Its Best
Twist lets you and your team breathe a little so that you can dedicate your workday to achieving project milestones. You can easily master this simple team communication app even on the first day of use.
The app is lightweight, lag-free, and doesn’t put unnecessary load on your desktop, laptop, or mobile app. Moreover, it gathers all work communications in modular threads. Now you can access the relevant information in real-time without scrolling through thousands of DMs and meeting transcripts.
