7 Creative Virtual Event Audience Engagement Ideas

Take your virtual events to the next level by improving your virtual audience engagement. The audience gets easily distracted, the attention span for virtual events is much less but there are numerous ways you can make your event engaging and keep your audience attentive. Start by outlining the parts of your webinar, and make sure to deploy one of these activities one after the other.
You can make your event interesting and engaging by providing the audience with things to do. Use elements of surprise and originality to keep them attentive. They need to feel like they are an active part of your event, rather than a mere attendee.

  1. Speaker
    One of the first ones is to select the speaker carefully. Have a speaker that's impactful, moving, and witty. Even in webinars of an utmost important matter, a little humor or a charismatic speaker goes a long way.
  2. Polling
    • Polling is one of the easiest ways to keep the audience engagement, use poll before and during the webinar.
    • Polling before the event allows you to gauge the views of the audience and alter accordingly if needed. The key to successful polling is that audience feels that they are genuinely contributing to the event. This helps in decreasing the no-show rate.
    • Polling during the event also increases their interest in the content, the event becomes more participatory than passive.

      • You can use word-clouds or multiple-choice depending on the size of your audience.

  3. Entertainment
    Many events are hiring entertainer for both small and large virtual events. Hiring entertainers is a great strategy for both small and large virtual events. Naturally, entertainers are great at engaging your audience.
    So, let me give you some examples of how entertainment can contribute to engagement. You can hire sketch artists to take notes in creative ways, performers or live singers for break periods if a longer webinar. The key is to use an activity that is entertaining and shareable. Your attendees upon being impressed will share their pictures on social media. You can also use entertainment such as hiring sommeliers or baristas for an online tasting and send attendees samples before the event to make it participatory.
  4. Pre-Event Bags
    Receiving a package is always an exciting ordeal, for your virtual events in 2021, send event bags to the members before the event. Having a concrete item to engage with during the virtual seminar or conference allows the audience to feel more connected with the theme. Make sure you fill the event bag with something exciting, or something that can be used during the event. This helps in reducing the no-show rate.
  5. Social Media Engagement
    An active audience can increase your social media presence, ensure that you have a hash-tag for the event so if anyone from the audience shares anything it's easier to locate. A hash-tag also insures a community-like feel amongst the members. You can also ask the audience to ask you questions through Twitter, or Instagram stories. This will give your event more exposure.
    You can also run a contest before the event, for example, for creative virtual events, ex. a photography event, you can choose to run a content based on the similar and announce the winner during the event. You can have many such contests like these to keep the audience glued from the beginning.
  6. Gamification for Virtual Event Engagement
    Optimize,India's No.1 virtual events platform's events not only look like real events but can be accessed like real ones as well. Virtual exhibition halls, and booths, and the ability to walk through the arena makes it more compelling for the audience to spend their time in. This mobility helps in increasing interactivity between the clients and the customers. Optimize is also responsible for creating customised virtual events, to meet your every aesthetic or interactive need.
  7. Conduct a Live Q&A
    Conduct a live Q&A to allow your attendees to engage. In a longer virtual event, this works best, have a dedicated time slot for the same. For a live Q&A, hire an expert to answer the questions of the attendees.