Monday, the 24th of August saw Zoom experience a big, much-publicized outage all across the globe. As news spread, businesses that relied on video communication began to form a consensus that a backup plan was needed.

Such an outage would not have made such a splash, even probably going unnoticed, but as video communications have become so integral for businesses to continue to move forward it made news from BBC to Washington Post. 

In addition to the increase in usage with Zoom, a lot of businesses banned the use of Zoom due to its security issues. This could have been verified when in November 2020, FTC issued a complaint that stated Zoom had been misleading its users since 2016 with end-to-end encryption – falsely.

But one question to ask here is that there have been similar outages and security issues for companies like Facebook & Twitter as well. So why the bad press?

Well one reason, is the manner in which that Zoom as a company has handled these outages along with the numerous previous security concerns.

But, all these questions regarding the security and reliability of the platform does not answer the question: is Zoom is ideal for the fitness industry.

To answer that, let’s look at some trends. The sector with the largest userbase for Zoom is education, and according to Apptopia, the usage increased by 67% by March 2020 (due to Covid-19).

Along with education, Zoom has been a pretty popular option for people who were looking to connect with friends and families as it was a free option.

Like many other sectors, Zoom has had an impact on the fitness sector as well. Whilst Zoom has been used heavily, 85% of personal trainers we asked, said that they saw no increase in the demand for their services. 

Here are 5 reasons why Zoom is not ideal for fitness businesses:

1.High-Quality Virtual Training: 

How many times have you heard issues with attendees of a Zoom session complain about audio problems?

Even when attendees manage to resolve these sound issues, there are problems that stem from calls being dropped and audio not being clear.

With the purpose of virtual training is getting up close and personal with their clients, Zoom does not give the ability for fitness businesses to run the best quality sessions.

2.Ease of Use: 

Turnfitter ran a study asking for the reasons why specific fitness professionals were not conducting online sessions, even after experiencing gyms closing down. The number one reason, the amount of time required to learn how to use applications, for both fitness professionals and clients.

With time being a valued resource, fitness businesses do not have the time to spend hours trying to teach clients, learning a system, and then making sure tools like Zoom are actually functional.

Zoom for fitness businesses takes way too much time and is too cumbersome as you still have to make sure meetings are created in a seamless way and then communicated in a seamless way. With Zoom these businesses still need multiple applications to run the business, which should not be the case.

3.Session Analytics: 

One of the biggest desires behind online training is for fitness businesses to generate revenue. In a recent study we conducted, 8 out of 10 personal trainers we asked stated that running live virtual sessions is mainly to generate extra revenue. Now, tools like Zoom or running Facebook live sessions gives little visibility into not only who is attending these live sessions but there is little way to track on the ROI of these sessions.

Zoom does not show the LTV of these sessions, and it does not allow a fitness business to simply send out a link and see new inquiries increase. Zoom’s main demographic is enterprise businesses and it considers it’s competitors to be companies like Microsoft Teams, so they will not understand the remits of what a fitness business requires.

4.Security: Apart from the downtime Zoom had on Monday, 24th of August there is a certain belief that security in Zoom is still not as good as it should be, especially considering the vast amount of people and businesses using it.

5.Generating New Clients: One of the most important reasons behind running a business is to generate revenue. Zoom and other platforms allow you to run live sessions, but they do not offer a way for businesses to use these sessions to generate more business. 

Turnfitter allows ambitious businesses to generate new clients, simply by allowing new clients to create accounts on the back of these live sessions.

 

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