Engaging your audience in a virtual event setting can look tricky but, it is not. There are a lot of ways to make your online event more engaging. Moreover, the engagement levels greatly depend on the virtual event platform you choose. This article will walk you through the various ideas that you can apply to make your online events immersive and interactive.

Use Gamification

Gamification is most probably the best idea to spark engagement at your virtual event. It has a significant and positive impact on the attendee engagement levels. Given its high success rate, platforms have started providing a feature that allows you to customize your event and add your favourite games. Some platforms also provide a games library to choose from. Therefore, you must ensure that the virtual event hosting platform has gamification as a feature.

Conduct Live Polls

You can conduct live polls before, during and after the event. The data derived from the live polls can help you choose the right course of action to make your event more engaging. These live polls can also set a track for the event and drive the conversation towards specific topics. The poll’s questions could ask the attendees to share their insights on a particular topic, session or the overall event experience. They can be conducted before, during and after the event. Moreover, you can ask the speakers to conduct a live poll at the end of a session and provide the attendees with a chance to share their views and insights. 

Include Q&A Sessions

An event full of one-way communication where just one person speaks, and the other listens will get boring after a certain point. Therefore, including question and answer sessions in your virtual event will help establish a two-way communication channel. This will enable the attendees to clear their doubts and ask questions. Q&A sessions are a great idea to spark engagement in your online events. It also enables the attendees to interact and communicate with the event hosts and speakers, share their ideas and ask questions.

Leaderboard

You can include a leaderboard in your virtual events. It helps boost engagement at your online event. It also displays the top participants of the event and the winners of different games. Moreover, it helps develop a healthy competition among the attendees. The presence of a leaderboard pushes the attendees to stay alert and participate in the various activities at your virtual event thus, increasing the engagement and participation levels. 

Cut-short Your Sessions

The attention spans of both online and offline attendees differ. Generally, it is easier to hold the attention of the offline attendees for a longer time than that of the online attendees. Therefore, while hosting events virtually, you need to keep your sessions shorter. Ideally, each session at your virtual event should not last for more than 30 minutes. This will help keep your online attendees engaged and spark their attention levels. 

Use AI Matchmaking

AI matchmaking makes your job easy by analyzing the details of each attendee and matching them with the right people to meet. This is an advanced technology that helps spark engagement. It also results in significant time savings for both the organizer and the attendees. The technology matches the attendees with the right people based on their common interests and objectives. Therefore, AI matchmaking must be a feature offered by the 3D virtual event platform you select.

Take Feedback

Taking feedback is important to build trust among the attendees and instil a feeling of belongingness in the attendee’s mind. Feedback forms and signature walls are great tools to gather feedback from the attendees. Therefore, you must take feedback from the attendees and based on the information collected you can also make arrangements for your future events. While the experiences shared through feedback forms stay anonymous, ones collected using signature walls are available in public.

Integrate Social Media With Your Event 

Another great way to spark engagement at online events is to make social media a part of it. You can use features like social walls to integrate the social media activities surrounding the event during your virtual event. Social walls can display the social media posts related to the event in real-time, thus making your event more engaging and interactive. You can sort the posts that include your event’s hashtag and represents your and your sponsor’s brands. Therefore, a social wall is a good engagement feature to include in your virtual events. 

Include a Virtual Photobooth

Everybody loves taking pictures. Including a virtual photo booth will enable the attendees to take pictures with other attendees and the hosts and create memories of the online event. While you might think that hosting virtual events mean missing out on taking pictures, it is not true. Features like an online photo booth can make this possible. Moreover, it also helps increase the engagement levels and keep the attendees interested in the event. Therefore, a virtual photo booth must form an important part of your online event. 

Engage in Pre-event Promotion

Engaging in pre-event promotion helps create hype around the event. It not only attracts more people to the event but, also helps increase the excitement for the online event. You can also use influencer marketing, email marketing and social media marketing to engage in the pre-event promotion. Moreover, you can include a celebrity speaker to attract more people to attend and stay till the end to listen to their favourite speaker. Per-event promotion can be done using platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Since most of your target audience is active on these platforms, this is the best way to conduct the pre-event promotion.

Make Your Content Exciting

Exciting and compelling content goes hand in hand with the engagement levels. Therefore, you must focus on creating exciting content for the online event. Include more graphs, charts, presentations and videos in your content to make it more understandable and eye-grabbing. 

Final Words

Hope this article helped you get an understanding of how you can make your event engaging by selecting the right virtual event platform.