Frederick Jace
A webinar is a modern-era way of sharing knowledge with other people. Webinars are conducted via the Internet that helps people worldwide gather in a virtual room. The audience listens to speakers and views slideshows presented online. Webinars are different from online presentations by the ability to interact with the audience in a virtual room.
Online seminars are very useful as they allow gaining knowledge by using a computer, tablet, or smartphone. Unfortunately, most webinars are not as engaging as face-to-face seminars because speakers don’t see their audience. If you want to keep your webinar engaging for the audience, follow the tips below.
Pick an Engaging Topic
For starters, you need to choose an interesting topic that will attract people and keep them engaged. After defining your target audience, you need to research and find a compelling topic that resonates with your potential viewers. The best way to develop a topic is to find the list of the most popular problems for your target audience and present the possible ways to solve them on your webinar.
Interact With Audience
A web seminar is a dialogue where speakers share their skills and knowledge, but not a monologue. Virtual rooms for webinars provide vast opportunities for interacting with the audience. Never be shy about using these tools, as the best way to keep viewers engaged is to interact with them constantly. Feel free to use polls to bring the feeling of a live event. It’s recommended to get an assistant who will constantly chat with viewers and answer their questions. Also, an assistant will help speakers not get distracted by chatting.
Hook Viewers
If you want your audience to stay engaged during your seminar, you need to hook viewers constantly. Anything that evokes interest can become a successful attention grabber. As usual, speakers share shocking statistics, tell interesting facts, share quotations, and even include memes into their presentation to hook listeners and increase their engagement level.
Feel free to hook the audience from the very beginning to start your webinar great. For instance, you can start a webinar for students by saying, “Using the secret knowledge from this online seminar, you will discover how to order papers and save your budget!” It will evoke learners’ interest in the very beginning.
Switch Between Slideshow and Webcam
Most seminars have the form of a slideshow with a background voice or a speaker’s face on a screen only. Both of the ways to deliver information worsen the level of engagement. A slideshow with comments on a background is similar to a video guide. However, when a speaker presents no visual information, viewers can hardly remember all the data and lose engagement rapidly. If you want to hold a top-quality webinar, you need to show your face and support vital information with slides, screen captures, videos, and other visual information.
Answer Questions Online
With the help of a chat, listeners can ask different questions to speakers. Ignoring the audience isn’t the best way to run a webinar. You need to answer the questions that people ask in the chat briefly. Feel free to draw viewers’ attention by asking them to vote by typing “+” in the chat if they want to discover an answer to a particular question.
In case you get too many questions, you need to answer the most frequently asked only. Otherwise, you can note all the questions and run a separate webinar, where you will share answers to all their questions.
Manage your Time
It is vital to follow your plan and deliver information fast if you don’t want viewers to get bored and start leaving a virtual room. Feel free to break your webinar on small topics and set time frames for discussing them. This tip will help you keep yourself safe from wasting valuable time on small talk. Also, you will be able to cover all the topics during the pre-set time. A large amount of helpful information shared by a speaker always keeps the audience alerted as they don’t like missing crucial details.
Conduct Giveaways
Promising a gift is a very reliable way to keep your audience engaged. Expecting a surprise, your viewers will be more attentive to details. For instance, running a webinar for learners who often surf the question, “Who can write my paper cheap?”, announce to share a secret paper creation tip at the end of your webinar. It will keep the audience excited by the opportunity to discover a secret that will help increase college performance.
Also, giveaways can help increase the number of people that your webinar will gather. However, if you don’t want a surprise to be the listeners’ motivation to register for your webinar, feel free to announce it in the middle of your online seminar.
Bonus Tip
If you want viewers’ attention to be focused on your presentation, you need to have great oratory skills. You should stay charged and spread the energy via the Internet. You have to be an active speaker who is excited by reviewing a particular problem and sharing valuable knowledge with listeners. Also, you need to take natural pauses to avoid potential monotony that may appear when you share a lot of information without interruptions.
