“Don’t cater to the audience Inspire the audience.” - Ken Danby
Capturing audience attention and engaging them for a long time is crucial for any event, whether live or online. But, the chances of audience zoning out and getting distracted is higher at virtual events. This is because they have external factors like, their surroundings, mobile phones, activities going on in the background, etc. to distract them from the event. Thus with a dip in audience interest virtual events find themselves in rough waters when it comes to forging strong connections with the attendees.
Let's understand from the article how to capture the audience's attention and keep attendees engaged for a longer time at virtual events.
The Essence of Audience Engagement
Audience engagement is a strategy that paints the big picture of an event by turning attendees into active participants to achieve event goals. Successfully engaging the audience in an event drives increased participation, improves involvement, and elevates satisfaction for the organizer as well as the audience. In addition, an engaged audience boosts the event’s recognition in the industry as the attendees share their experiences on social media and become brand ambassadors for the event - by creating buzz and engaging referrals for the future.
Reasons Why Audience Engagement Is Important in Virtual Events?
It is difficult to keep attendees focused at virtual events, and hence finding innovative methods for audience engagement serves to be a crucial task for the organizers. When people attend an online event, they probably attend it from their workplace or home. Despite their best efforts to stay focused, the attendees may have a lot of distractions to contend with. That means your online event engagement needs to be top-notch!
The more online event audience is engaged, the more they enjoy the event with fellow attendees and stick around for longer. This builds strong connections amongst attendees, that last event after the event; leading to solid word of mouth publicity and market recognition.
Every event revolves around the audience for its success or failure. It is challenging to keep up with the attendee’s dwindling engagement levels at virtual events as the attention span is significantly less. Due to external factors, the attendees are likely to get distracted very soon. Consequently, a successful event delivery is directly proportional to the audiences’ sustained engagement levels.
6 Potent Ways to Keep Your Virtual Event Audience Engaged
Design Virtual Events for Shorter Attention Spans!
Attention spans of audiences at online events or activities are shorter than at in-person events. Virtual event organizers should plan shorter sessions of about 25 minutes or longer sessions with interactive elements.
A virtual event can receive
maximum attendee engagement if it has high production value and this productivity comes from executions like virtual green rooms, seamless technical support, branded visual elements, etc. Following different engagement tactics that sustain audience attention spans will help build a successful virtual event.