What are the best ways to engage your audience during virtual events?

In addition to Q&A sessions, you can ask people to answer one or more survey questions on a topic relevant to the presentation (pick an event platform that supports surveys). This allows you to make the presentation more compelling by engaging the audience, immediately showing survey results, and and involving attendees in discussing the results.

Engaging participants in virtual events is very challenging. As a presentation trainer I get asked this a lot.
There are five things I’d like to add to what’s been said so far.

One –
I know this sounds obvious, but engaging participants in a virtual environment starts with creating compelling and relevant content. Too many times I’ve participated in webinars in which the speakers had nothing new to say.

Two –
Do not read from a script. If people sense that the speaker is scripted they’ll tune out very quickly. Instead, make it feel like a conversation. Each person should feel as if you’re speaking directly to him/her. The way I recommend doing this is to have a second person in the room with you and speak directly to him/her. They will react. Respond accordingly just like you would in everyday conversation. Using this technique, your intonation will sound natural and interesting to attendees.

Three –
I’m more inclined to stay engaged when there is more than one speaker. It’s more interesting to listen to multiple voices with (perhaps) differing points of view. If you can include multiple speakers I recommend it. Just assign who will deliver what prior to going live.

Four –
Don’t confuse the “engagement tools” included in the event platform software with human engagement techniques. Think of those tools as “interaction” tools. Using them does very little to engage people, but they do a lot to keep people active.

Five –
When you use a poll or some other interaction tool that requires attendees to type something. Give them time to do it. Ending a poll before I have time to respond only makes me tune out sooner. My recommendation is to set up the poll clearly and tell people how much time you’ll give them to respond. Then count it down for them. This technique will give you the urgency you want so that people will participate, but still give them an appropriate window of time to complete the task.