The challenge in webinars is to keep the audience engaged for the duration of around 60 – 90 minutes. It is not easy!
In today’s ‘fast food based culture’ where attention span is transient, the presenters have to find new ways to keep the interest of the participants alive.
Asking your online attendees a live poll question is a simple and effective way to connect with them on a personal level or bring your audience back in if you sense they may be zoning out.
Enter – Polling and survey software that enables the presenters to engage with the audience in real time in a hugely participative and non intrusive manner.
One such solution is Polly, which helps you get timely feedback from the right people, at the right time, in the right place. Polly is an intelligent chatbot technology that can be embedded in webinars to gauge the participants’ sentiments. With Polly, one can do both anonymous and non-anonymous reviews. The ability to send the poll via direct message also comes in handy for polls that cross-group channels. Scheduling of polls also helps with time management. Polly is currently supported on Slack and Microsoft Teams platforms.
Another live polling software that is immensely popular is Slido. Engage your online participants with live polls, Q&A, and quizzes as they’re watching your virtual event or webinar. With Slido you can ask your participants their opinion and let them vote instantly from any device. It is possible to integrate Slido with popular live-streaming platforms like Zoom or just embed it to your event page right next to the video stream.
Here are some popular questions to pose to your audience:
Where are you joining us from? The responses can be shown in the ‘Word cloud’.
On a scale of 1-10, how are you feeling today? The response can be depicted in a chart.
What would you like to learn today? The answers can be displayed in ‘Open text’.
Why did you decide to attend this event? Answer in ‘Multiple choice’ options.
A few of the polls can be just for fun, just to break up the content and add more spontaneity to the session.
Depending on the length and nature of your content, look for places where you can add segments of interaction to complement and expand on the information you are giving them.