Tips for Increasing Engagement at Your Virtual Event

Virtual events are becoming increasingly popular as more businesses move towards digitization. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to engage participants in the same ways as you can during in-person events.

Although you might have to use different methods to engage your participants, virtual events are still extremely beneficial. All you need is some prep time and a quick rundown of how to create an engaging virtual event.

If you’re in the midst of your virtual event planning and want to make sure it will engage your audience, follow the tips below.

Interesting & Engaging Content

It’s true that you’ll have to present content in a much more vibrant, energetic way or you’ll lose your audience’s attention.

When you’re creating the slides for your event, choose eye-catching photos and intriguing bullet points. Don’t fill entire pages with text and don’t assume you can talk about the same information for the full conference. Virtual fatigue is real, so make sure to break up the information and even consider adding breaks so that your audience can take in everything that you’re saying.  

Invite an Exciting Guest Speaker

The best event hosts are those that can captivate an audience even during a virtual event. You may not be able to bring in a celebrity host or a world-renowned speaker, but you should take the time to find an exciting guest speaker.

Guest speakers give your event a different dynamic. If you have one or two speakers for the same event, your audience is much less likely to get bored or distracted halfway through.

When you invite a guest speaker, make sure they have a good handle on the theme and know what they’re going to be talking about. They should be excited about doing the event too. An excited speaker is an exciting speaker.

Gamify Your Event

One of the best ways to increase engagement at your virtual event is with gamification.

When you gamify your event, you allow your audience to participate in a more concrete way. Winning points and prizes can encourage participants to pay more attention or follow through with what you ask them to.

Gamifying your event isn’t difficult. In fact, it’s easy to incorporate into your virtual event as you only need a few minutes. Rather than presenting them with information for an entire hour, make the last ten or fifteen minutes into a game that reviews all the information you’ve talked about.

Use Polling

Both pre-event polling and live polling can increase engagement before and during your event. Pre-event polling informs your participants how valuable attending your event will be for them. Using pre-polling, you can also determine what topics are of interest to your audience and tailor the event to suit them better.

If you use live polling, you’ll have an easy way to encourage participation and therefore, engagement. It’s an easy and simple way to interact with participants during the event without having to adjust your current theme or plan. The questions you ask in a live poll are unlimited and can make great transitions.

Create Social Media Contests

Almost everyone has social media these days, so why not take advantage of that? At the very least, you should create a hashtag that participants can use. You can then use the hashtag as a way to enter a contest or create more engagement.

With social media, your event will spread quicker and your audience will be more engaged from the start. When you incorporate a fun and free contest to go along with your event, more people are bound to participate. 

Conclusion

It can be difficult to engage your audience during a virtual event, but it’s certainly not impossible. With the many tools provided by the internet, you should be able to create a unique and engaging virtual event without much hassle.  Hire GSE AV today to help implement your Virtual Event, to get your message out effectively.