How do you keep your webinar attendees engaged? It’s probably one of the most common questions in the world of virtual events, and those seeking a simple answer will be sorely disappointed. But it can be done using these 10 tips — brought to you by Gemma Falconer, UK webinar host for Citrix.

1. Know your content.

It seems simple. And it is simple. But it takes effort to rehearse your presentation over and over. Making these vital preparations will give you the confidence to deliver a persuasive presentation and help grab attention. Your audience members are clever little things and will pick up on hesitation in a flash. Coming across as confident and an expert in your field will re-assure the audience that what you have to say is important and worth listening to. And if you can present without reading from a script — even better!

2. Energy!

I love this one. It may come naturally to you or require a bit of practice, but when presenting, try and sound energetic. If you’re passionate and excited about your content, then your audience will feed on that enthusiasm. On a recent webinar we asked the audience to tell us the most disengaging thing a speaker could do on a virtual meeting/presentation — and the most popular response was “talking with a monotone voice”. So remember to keep your energy levels up and ensure that your voice has pitch variances throughout the event.

3. Webinar duration

One hour. Forty-five minutes. Thirty minutes, or even shorter. Make sure you get the duration of your virtual event just right. You will probably find that the shorter your webinar, the more engaged your audience will be. You’ll be forced to pack in the most important tips in the time you have, and people will know that they only have to concentrate for X amount of time before they can go back to their work.

Time is limited for many of us, so ask your potential audience what their preference would be with regard to duration. And if you are already running webinars, add the question to the exit survey so you can get immediate feedback.

4. Yay! Another PowerPoint!

Hands up if you use a PowerPoint-style presentation during your webinar. Most of us do — it’s an easy way to display and share information. However, with some platforms (such as GoToWebinar), you can drop out of PowerPoint at any time and share whatever is on your desktop. Give users something different to look at — maybe you want to highlight something on a particular website — or bring up a document to annotate on during the webinar itself. You can share anything that’s on your screen. Be brave!

5. Planned/ad-hoc breaks

Getting the audience involved during the course of a presentation can be a great way of keeping their attention. Plan or include ad-hoc breaks so you can ask them a question — get them to respond by typing their responses into the webinar platform — and read a few out to make them feel loved. You can ask them to participate in a polling question so they can see what their peers are thinking there and then, and you can also ask them to raise their hand so you can gauge how many people agree/disagree with a point you are making.

Want more like this?

Want more like this?

Insight delivered to your inbox

Keep up to date with our free email. Hand picked whitepapers and posts from our blog, as well as exclusive videos and webinar invitations keep our Users one step ahead.

sign up

By clicking 'SIGN UP', you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy

SIGN UP

By clicking 'SIGN UP', you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy

6. Stimulate the eye.

There are a couple of ways to do this. 1) Use annotation tools to draw people’s eyes to relevant points on the screen, and 2) Make sure that your slides are interesting to look at. Try not to go too crazy with the amount of text you are using — people find it hard to read and listen at the same time. Try to replace the bulk of your text with images instead.

7. Let them speak!

Another way of keeping the audience involved is by asking if one or two people have a comment or question they’d like to make verbally. Yes, I said it — verbally. That means unmuting someone! Ask them to raise their hand, and you can unmute their line.

8. Hints and tips

A big no-no in the world of online events is spending half of your presentation on setting the scene, i.e. giving the history and background of a particular topic. Although this tends to be interesting info, your attendees are there looking for hints and tips. And lots of them. So try to get to your points quickly so people walk away from the webinar thinking, “Great — I’ll try that.”

9. Twitter #hashtag

Multitasking is the major temptation for your webinar attendees. They know that no one can see them – and few of them know that we can see if they’re actually paying attention or not (Google the GoToWebinar dashboard!). Provide a Twitter hashtag and you will encourage multitasking in a good way — your attendees will be talking about the webinar itself, which is better than them checking their email.

10.Competition time

Everyone loves the chance to win something. You could introduce a free book giveaway and announce the winners at the end of the webinar, or you could say, “Pay attention to the webinar, and after the presentation, we’ll ask you a question on the content. Get it right and you’ll win a [insert name of wonderful prize here].”