Audience engagement has always been the main focus for all the event organizers. They have been trying all their efforts to boost the engagement of the audiences and increase their interest in the event.
Unlike in-person events where you can drag your audience towards participation by offering them certain gifts and prizes, audience engagement in virtual events is a way more tough task.
Here in this blog, we have discussed various ideas to boost engagement in your virtual event to drive more participation and interaction during the event.
Trending Virtual Event Engagement Ideas
1. Create interactive content
The most essential part of any event (be it an in-person event or virtual event) is the content that you display to the audiences. This content plays an important role in delivering the idea of your event and showcasing to people the objective of the event.
Content is the trump card that can either break your event or make it. It is therefore important to make your content interactive so that your audience can think of participating in the event.
You can add visuals, gifs, question-answers, user-generated content, etc. to draw their interest more towards the virtual event.
2. Social media contest
To make your virtual event even more engaging, incorporating the elements of social media is a good game plan. With this, you can encourage maximum audience participation in your event.
The most important is to create a dedicated hashtag for your event. You can ask your audiences to create compelling content on social media using the event hashtag.
For example, you can ask them to post their own picture in a creative way during the event and upload it using the hashtag. The most creative one will get the gift hamper. This idea will encourage all the audiences to participate in the virtual event and engage with the objectives of the event.
3. Social media wall with live streaming
As discussed in the above point, social media is the game-changing plan for any event. By displaying your social media presence to your audiences, you can attract their attention and hold them for a long time.
One such way is by displaying a social media wall along with the live streaming of the virtual event. This social wall can display a variety of content ranging from specific branded content to user-generated content such as visuals.
Event organizers can create their own customized social wall using a social media aggregator tool such as Taggbox and can even moderate it and personalize it according to the interest of the attendees.
This social wall can drag the attendees to engage with the event as it boosts the interaction between the attendees of the events and the speakers. Using hashtags and mentions, event organizers can curate the social media feed and can display it to the audience in the form of a social wall.
4. Gamification
Gamification always works great when it comes to engaging an audience during the event be it live or virtual. It is a good way to enhance the interactivity of your virtual event.
Gamification such as virtual photo booths, polls, puzzles, questionnaires, etc. can help you grab the attention of your audiences towards the virtual event. This, therefore, helps to maximize the attendance of the virtual event.
5. Virtual event bags
Who doesn’t love to be gifted? In fact, we all get a little attention when we are about to get a gift or reward and then we start loving the environment we are working with.
This is what you can do as an event organizer. You can send a swag bag to the attendees of the event with a small gift that can be used during the event and has to be opened when asked to do so.
It will ensure that the attendees remain engaged with the event and do not turn their heads off the screen to know what is the use of the gift they are sent before the event.
6. Conduct live Q&A round
To know about the queries of the attendees is a must task for all event organizers especially for virtual events. It is crucial for the speakers and event organizers to know what problems their audience is facing and what doubts they have during the event.
With a live Q&A round, you can create an interactive session between all the attendees of the event and the speakers. This will give the participants a chance to have a conversation with the speakers and get their problems solved.
Also, as an event organizer, you can display this Q&A session on the social wall wherein the attendees post their doubts using the dedicated event hashtag. It will make your social wall even more interactive and will increase the engagement of the audience with the virtual event.
Conclusion
As compared to live in-person events, it is a tedious task to hold your audience during the virtual event which results in a lower success rate of the virtual event.
To make your virtual event more engaging and interactive, we have mentioned 6 event engagement ideas which you can use to boost the performance graph of your virtual event.