Featured article by Mujahid Khan
Webinars are a great tool for engaging with your audience and communicating messages. However, this depends heavily on the platform you use – to engage and interest your audience, you must be able to employ several webinar features. To assist you in hosting a successful webinar, here are some features that everyone should take advantage of on a webinar platform.
Breakout sessions
‘Breakout sessions’ are a feature that allows you to divide the number of attendees in your webinar into smaller, separate groups. Several webinar platforms like ON24 allow you to establish a large number of break out sessions to separate any number of attendees into various groups. This allows you to have a variety of speakers, and avoids forcing specific participants to sit through certain segments that are irrelevant to them. For example, you may find you have two discussions that need to occur at the same time, so you could split attendees into breakouts for these two separate topics.
Live chat
It will be important to provide a live chat option in your webinar so that you or the host speaker can engage with the audience and attendees. While you may allow participants to speak up with their microphones, not all attendees may be willing to speak aloud, or they may not have a microphone to speak with. In this sense, the live chat feature is great for being able to broadcast any questions, answers, responses and anything you and the attendees might want to say, without having to speak out loud.
Polls are great for engagement
Individually asking people questions and soliciting their opinions can be time-consuming. However, by incorporating a poll, you can ask any question for all participants to respond to at once, and have their say without having to speak out. When hosting a webinar, engagement is critical, and the thoughts and opinions of attendees are extremely important. Polls will allow you to gain a better understanding of participants’ collective thoughts, and how they are finding the actual webinar itself.
Mobile accessibility
Many individuals prefer viewing webinars and content on their phones and mobile devices since they are more portable and convenient, allowing them to attend remotely from wherever they are. You should opt for a webinar platform that is completely mobile-friendly and supports all major mobile devices, making it easier for people to attend and view your webinar, and assisting you in optimising audience numbers, too.
Ability to record the webinar
In some cases, it is unlikely that everyone you invite to your webinar is going to be able to attend it at a time that is most ideal for them. As a result, being able to record your webinars for those who can’t attend so that they can view them later will mean you won’t miss out on acquiring prospective clients, or have people miss out on valuable information. Being able to record the entire webinar and chat is even better, as it means individuals who view the recorded version can see the real-time chat and discussions that took place live.
So, there you have a few examples of key webinar features that are essential for improving participation, attendance, accessibility, engagement, and efficiency of your event. Take advantage of these features to ensure that your next webinar runs as smoothly and productively as possible.
