How to make virtual meetings more interactive? Improving the engagement of your virtual event audience will take your virtual events to the next level. It’s vitally important to have engaging events, because it’s very easy for your audience to get distracted while attending your online events.
You probably know it yourself: How often do you attend a webinar and then you end up doing something else while it’s running? In order to avoid this with your own audience, we want to give you some tips on what you can do to make your virtual event more engaging and interactive. Let’s get started right away.
1. Make the content compelling
Compelling content is the first step towards engagement. It adds to the attendee experience and makes them a willingly captive audience. Build it up. Go for pre-event content to amp up excitement for the upcoming meeting/event, and during the event, deck up short sessions to keep them interested, mix speeches with jokes, slides, add visual content.
Introduce engagement – break long sessions with a quick Q&A break. And once the event is over, keep in touch with a recap, or highlights. This will make everyone feel included, involved, and valued.
2. High quality content is key
Keep the production value right at the top. Most of it is just a creative use of the computer and doesn’t cost much, but it will add to the overall snazziness. An interesting meeting room layout, smartly designed presentation of products, walk-thru footage of your company, videos to add to the variety – include all this.
But ensure the quality of each of this is really high. Follow the best video-making practices, mark meeting rooms with branded backdrops, a great sound system and internet. Get the camera angles and lighting on the speakers to the point, spend some time over the graphics. All this goes a long way in capturing attendees’ attention, and keeping it with you throughout!
3. Don’t make the sessions too long
Just because you had day-long in-person conferences doesn’t mean you do the same virtually. It’s a different ball game altogether online, where Netflix is just a click away. Anyone watching a long session alone sitting in a room, even if it’s packaged well with music, inspiring keynotes, et al, will find it difficult to concentrate for long.
What other things can you do to make a virtual event interactive and engaging?
You can make a virtual event engaging by constantly providing your audience with things to do. To keep your audience engaged, you need to do something unique and surprising. Provide interactive elements to make your audience feel incredibly engaged in your virtual event.
During events and conferences, in addition to the judicious choice of themes and angles, speakers, preparation to have high quality content in line with the expectations of the audience – one of the key issues of an editorial board is to involve and engage the participants. In order to have this strong involvement, the objective is to implement different actions over time:
- before the event (communication, program, teasing, publishing and sharing content and interview texts and videos, conducting polls, voting…)
- during the event (by different means, to create interactions, debates and exchanges…)
- and after the event (continue the exchanges, share content, broadcast video conferences and interviews, publish bonuses, collect opinions…).
Reinforce the proximity with your audience
If we focus on the moment of a conference, one of the key factors of this involvement for the speaker(s) and organizer(s) to capture the attention of the audience is to engage them as much as possible. To do so, it is important to create an exchange with the audience and the speakers, to make them active, to reinforce the proximity with them, to highlight them and to stick to their expectations. It is also important to disseminate and encourage the relaying of conference content on social networks, thus allowing interaction with a wider audience.
Interactions during the presentations are key and reinforce the link and the proximity, they allow to have richer and more adapted exchanges. How do you use digital solutions to energize your conferences – as a presenter or speaker – and engage your audience?
A conference is successful if, beyond the content of course, it captures and holds the attention of the audience from start to finish. It is important during a conference to create a close contact, emotion, a real exchange and rich interactions. This facilitates the transmission and memorization of key messages.
Elements to make virtual meetings more interactive
For this, some elements to make virtual meetings more interactive work very well during conferences to encourage interactions and engage the audience:
- Facilitate and simplify interactions between the audience in attendance and the speaker(s) and moderator: allow for questions, comments, live polling or voting, keyword queries to identify a trend…. Ideally via the participants’ smartphones, whether by SMS, via a dedicated application or social networks or directly via a website.
- Facilitate interactions with a wider audience on social networks. They allow us to inform, inspire, engage and enhance the audience.
- project on screen these interaction elements during the conference by moderating (or not) questions and comments (live tweets, questions asked, collaborative word clouds, results of polls and votes in real time…), this allows to share with everyone live, to highlight contributions, to incite to react, to motivate influencers and contributors and to increase their engagement…
- broadcast the live conference on social networks. work with influencers to relay and boost these interactions
These elements are simple to use, very visual, transparent. They stimulate, make people active, allow them to express themselves and everyone to find the means of expression that suits them. How to make virtual meetings more interactive should be a question that can be answered now. But we still have more…
Which activities guarantee the best engagement?
Not all people who are interested in an event are quite active. The interaction with the audience is varied and real-time and it’s best when it is dynamic, with energy and when everyone is encouraged to think and contribute in their own way.
Therefore, it is important to share with the audience the elements of interaction in a visual way, it’s always more explicit and engaging. For example, conducting live polls and votes with the audience during conferences, asking the audience to qualify key elements via words and visually sharing the results is a real element of engagement
This allows everyone to think, to be active and involved, to exchange around the theme, with the speaker and with everyone else… Moreover, allowing people to react and ask questions live, to share them on a screen with the audience is very rich and allows rebounds and interactions, and also facilitates meetings after the conference, either during the event or a little later.
Beneficial tools for the digital transformation of companies?
Our uses have evolved considerably, and interactive digital tools are now fully integrated into our habits and daily lives. This is a very good thing because they make our daily lives easier, simpler, more fluid and free up time…
The use of these tools in the digital transformation of companies is a vast subject. These digital tools are the means to serve this transformation. They contribute to and strongly help to bring employees on board, to accompany them in their transformation and are the necessary allies of the transformation of companies. I will illustrate this with two key examples: firstly, their contribution to the transformation of working methods and operations, and secondly, their contribution to training.
Interactive digital tools (especially collaborative ones) are part of the essential elements of the digital transformation of companies in terms of functioning and working methods. These tools help to be much more agile and to simplify exchanges. They enable transversality, fluidity, real-time sharing of information and documents, facilitate collaboration and work on the same projects, management of the different actions and contributions of each person and sharing of the vision of projects, products, resources…. They encourage creativity, ideation and collective intelligence, and simplify working remotely or in different locations. Do you now understand how to make virtual meetings more interactive?
Accelerate digital training
Interactive digital tools are at the heart of the digital transformation of companies in terms of culture, training and support. They enable rapid deployment of training, with new ways of learning and highly effective pedagogy, offering more individualized training paths, and choosing a personalized form of learning adapted to each person’s pace: virtual classes, distance learning, training that combines traditional face-to-face and online learning methods, situational simulations, online tests, exchanges with teachers, etc.
These tools provide employees with new capabilities for acquiring skills and continuous training, and make access to training much easier. They allow for easy validation of the appropriation of training content. These tools also enable gamification (challenges, rankings, rewards, etc.), which increases commitment and provides a real fun experience. In addition, on these 2 aspects, methods and training, they allow to save time, efficiency and productivity.
Conclusion – How to make virtual meetings more interactive:
When it comes to virtual meetings or events like webinars and conferences, thinking outside the box is the only solution to keep all the participants hooked from the beginning till the end. In fact, an online meeting doesn’t have to be any less than a face-to-face one when it comes to engagement – that is, if you manage to creatively occupy the attention span of the participants throughout.
A recent survey found that 49% of marketers say that audience engagement is the biggest contributing factor to having a successful virtual event and 87% of marketers consider the opportunities generated by virtual events as a success factor. Now that you know how to make virtual meetings more interactive, keeping them inspired, focused, and participating is the only way to ensure that they don’t zone out mentally halfway!
