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This initial interaction will help alleviate any awkwardness and nerves that attendees may be feeling. It sets a friendly and inviting tone from before the webinar starts. It can be challenging to keep people engaged when you’re delivering a webinar presentation. By highlighting the trending messages, you show what's happening in the chat.
Host engaging Q&A sessions
With so few options for interactions, webinar hosts may only choose to engage the audience once in a while for fear of boring them. Not to mention it takes planning and preparation to create a fully interactive experience in a way that doesn’t interrupt the flow of the webinar. Livestorm is a browser-based presenting tool that easily helps you create automated webinars. It integrates with more than a hundred pieces of software and apps.
Show videos of awardees in between sessions; virtual award ceremonies
At that point, I feel pretty good about letting someone get on a mic. On the other hand, just inviting anyone to talk usually doesn’t net the best results. Overall, it’s very important to consider that attendees do, in fact, want to get to know each other. A lot of times it seems that organizers or speakers focus almost solely on conveying their own intelligence or imparting or sharing the wisdom they possess; they forget that there are other people in the room. It turns out that doesn’t usually happen; instead, you get a room with one or two people having an awkward conversation with 10 or 20 silent, bored bystanders. So assigning a leader or facilitator to each room makes a lot of sense.
Virtual Conference Platforms Are Stuck In The Internet’s Past
You should also test your platform beforehand to ensure that it works smoothly and reliably. Encourage continuous engagement and keep people from bouncing out—or falling asleep—by offering interactive features as consistent elements of your presentation. In 2022, it’s more important than ever to adopt webinar tools that offer features like immersive share (where you place yourself directly on the content you’re sharing) to keep things visually stimulating and engaging. Frequent webinar watchers and makers may have already noticed the evolution of the webinar platform from a basic one-directional form of communication to something altogether more engaging and interactive. If your audience doesn’t feel like they’re getting something valuable from your webinars, what’s the point of hosting them in the first place? Audience engagement is almost entirely dependent on how much interactivity you introduce into your sessions (and how well it’s executed).
But important to note here is that the participants are involved and interact via chat, polls and other types of interaction. Just watching a video on-demand or a pre-recorded webinar is a completely different experience, and often requires that this material is well-produced in order to maintain the participant's focus. Recorded material can play an important role, especially if it is broadcasted at specific times and made more interactive with live chat, polls, etc. The genuine relationships you build with your targeted segment today will boost your sales funnel and lead to stronger prospects in the future.
Engage Your Audience with Live Polls
It’s not uncommon for a facilitator to ask a group to share a fun fact about themselves. That can actually be pretty stressful and feel a bit competitive. A prompt that I heard not too long ago that I’ve been using and really like is the opposite of that. You simply ask the audience to share a boring fact about themselves. Still, it’s amazing how something so mundane and dumb manages to connect people and start conversations.
We adapted that podcast club fairly successfully to an online format using Zoom. Let’s dive into a few specific interactions you can add to increase your webinar engagement. Don’t simply gather information from your audience, take the time to reply to it. Responding to your guest's answers makes them feel valued, which boosts audience engagement and credibility. You may have missed something during your slideshow, for example, and have to explain it in deeper detail.
Discussion:
This way, you get valuable insights into who your audience is and what they’re looking for. And armed with that knowledge, you can take the conversation around what they want to learn. Whether or not you choose icebreakers that relate to your topic, make sure they're light-hearted and fun.
Improve the production values of the session
Switch up your webinars by featuring multiple guest speakers, random CTAs, and other incentives to increase consistent audience engagement and keep your attendance high. Opportunities to participate will hold your audience’s attention as they eagerly await to get involved. From building your brand to gaining the trust of your audience, engaging interactions are a must for every webinar and online event. If your audience only wanted to watch a performance, they could simply turn on their TVs or head to social media. They’re watching your webinar so they can be part of the discussion, so let them.
You can use these findings to create more successful events in the future. For example, many people want to know the best day and time to hold a webinar. While there are theories and a few identified sweet spots—like midweek and midday after lunch—your specific audience behavior should dictate the timing. This is one reason why it’s especially critical to conduct frequent project retrospectives and even project pre-mortems so you can learn from your previous events and address issues before they occur. To follow up on the point above, it’s essential to keep the conversation going post-webinar.
When it comes to the way that you’re presenting, there are plenty of ways that will make your webinar more engaging. You can try to change the rhythm and pace when you’re talking to the attendees. It’s essential for people who attend any event to see that the host is well-prepared and interested in the topic.
This is why we recommend keeping your answers to about 1 minute so that you've plenty of time to answer questions and keep the momentum high. Most people brush over this because they think every webinar platform is the same. So choose a webinar platform that helps you engage in a way that works best for your audience. It's smart to check out the feature pages of the webinar platforms you're looking at before making your choice. While it’s tempting to reserve a Q&A session for the end of your webinar, it’s wise to pause periodically during your webinar to ensure your attendees are caught up. Take a minute or two to solicit audience questions and invite them to input their comments in the chat box.
13 Best Webinar Software (2024) – Forbes Advisor - Forbes
13 Best Webinar Software ( – Forbes Advisor.
Posted: Sun, 17 Mar 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]
You’ll find Kendall on our webinar, where she shares her expert insights on content production, branding, and more. When you finish your webinar use the Magic Clips feature to turn your best moments into shareable social media content. With text-based editing, you can trim out content by simply deleting text from your recording transcript.
When your live webinar audience feels relaxed and engaged, you can use the public chat or chat questions to uncover pre-purchase questions that may prevent some people from buying as soon as possible. I also like the bullet point sessions and having opposing viewpoints. The bullet point idea forces a presenter to be concise in the same vein of something like a Pecha Kucha presentation. Or even an 18-minute TED Talk that distills a really complicated topic in a relatively brief amount of time. In short, we don’t usually need 30 or 60 minutes on a topic if we’re thoughtful about what the audience really wants to hear and needs to hear. And on the subject of a debate, that’s a really interesting and engaging format.
It’s very difficult for groups to self-organize without a leader when you talk about 6 or more people online. It can turn into a rather awkward session of people staring around trying to figure out who’s going to talk and when. You can ask a question with a set answer and, when attendees answer it, they are told whether or not they answered the question correctly. You can even add multiple Quiz questions to a webinar and show cumulative results at the end. A large variety of real-time interactions allows you to more effectively hold the attendee’s attention and keep them interested. While there are probably 50+ different tactics you could use to make a webinar interactive, we want to give you the three most impactful things you can do that will give you the biggest engagement boost.
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