During the COVID pandemic lockdown, we stayed connected with friends and family through virtual dinners and parties. At work, we zoomed in on meetings, workshops, and luncheons. Even concerts changed venues from arenas to screens. Two years later, as the pandemic has slowly become less of a threat, virtual events are part of the new normal.

One of the first lessons we learned once we were forced to adapt events into a virtual format, is screened events and live in-person events can’t share the same modus operandi, and execution. Event planners everywhere have been challenged to optimize time and resources to make virtual events easy-going, entertaining, and interactive.

Here we share 3 best practices to stream your virtual meeting to success:

1-    Ensure the best platform

You may have booked top speakers, and have planned an ambitious agenda for your event, but if your connection fails, the only thing attendees will remember is the technical problems they faced.

A study published in 2011 revealed audiences feel frustrated with video chats when there was just a one-second delay, and this delay affects perception:another study published in 2014 found people perceived the speaker as less attentive and friendly when a 1.2-second delay was experienced.

2-    Quality over Quantity

Even though attendees can join the event from the comfort of their homes, you must keep in mind your event is competing for their attention with all the distractions on site. Plus, the increasing use of smartphones and social media content consumption has reduced our attention span considerably. So keep your sessions short: instead of one day-long seminar full of activities, break down the agenda into one-hour-long sessions distributed over several days, and mix different kinds of activities during the day.

3-    Simplify engagement and interaction

In many cases, it’s not that people at the audience don’t want to participate and interact in a virtual meeting, is that they don’t know how to. To keep the audience’s attention, you can integrate some interactive activities into the session like polls, quizzes, and surveys. To encourage interactions between audience members, smaller sessions in break-out rooms can be an effective way to ignite a conversation.

The COVID pandemic revolutionized the virtual events industry. The best way to ensure success in your next event is to know how to apply the available technology to keep your audience interested and engaged. Mobii provides seamless live interaction between real-time data and low-latency video to deliver a positive engaging experience for viewers.

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