Hybrid events have allowed businesses to reach out to a greater number of audience and host truly global events. That’s not to say that it hasn’t come without it’s set of hurdles, the biggest of which is keeping audiences engaged throughout. In a recent survey, 68% of event organizers identified audience engagement and facilitating networking between on-site and remote attendees as their biggest challenge at hybrid events.
To put it in the most straightforward way, audience engagement is a deciding factor for the success of your hybrid event. This holds especially true for younger audiences that are susceptible to getting distracted very easily.
Ensuring that your attendees feel involved throughout the event with lots of interactive things to do will inevitably take your hybrid event experience to the next level.
7 Ideas To Provide The Best Hybrid Event Experience
Here are 7 cool tips to keep your audiences involved & engaged, no matter how big or small your event is:
1. Live and Pre-Event Polls
Live polls are one of the most interactive features that can be used during any type of hybrid event and can bring great value. By conducting polls, you can capture powerful feedback in real-time, gather data and also make attendees feel more involved in the event.
This will also give the users a motive to stay back until the end of the event to witness the results of the polls.
2. Leverage Gamification
Gamification is the process of integrating game mechanics to your event, where attendees can take part and challenge each other, and receive points at the end of the event.
It is perhaps the most underrated feature that can effectively enhance the user experience and make your hybrid event fun, unique and compelling.
Moreover, it also boosts overall user participation during the event. You can also prompt your attendees to share their scores on social media and promote your event.
3. Host Q&A Sessions
Like live polls, a Q&A session is another great feature that will help you add value to your event.
Having Q&A sessions gives attendees an opportunity to interact with hosts and guests in real time, and find out more about topics discussed in the event.
Often considered a staple in in-person events, Q&A sessions are ideal for facilitating an exchange of ideas, sharing knowledge, and more. Include a leaderboard in the virtual lobby to keep the audience motivated and engaged.
Also read: 10 Tips for Selecting the Best Platform for Hybrid Events
4. Run Social Media Contests
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn- there are plenty of possibilities when it comes to leveraging social media for hybrid events. People love competitions, and they love to win prizes even more.
Running a contest on social media is a great way to get more members of the audience involved. This also helps indirectly market your event across social media platforms and helps get your event in front of more potential attendees.
Also, create a hashtag for your event using which attendees can share snippets from your events on social media.
5. Ask Me Anything Sessions (AMAs)
Similar to Q&A sessions, AMA sessions are a way to transparently engage with your audience to promote new features, updates and products, and connect with users in real time during a hybrid event.
This happens on a slightly intimate level since in this case, attendees are the ones who ask their own questions as opposed to answering pre-decided ones.
6. Attendee Feedback
Attendee feedback is one of the best methods to understand how your audience feels about your event and gauge its success, and also make your audience feel that their opinion is valued.
Feedback also helps attendees share their personal thoughts and opinions, which thereby helps form stronger connections between the audience and host(s).
For a start, you can begin with a simple rating system where attendees can rate each session. Cutting-edge hybrid event platforms integrate with various survey tools, offering you the opportunity to capture more detailed feedback from attendees.
In addition, feedback helps improve aspects of your hybrid event that were not up to the mark.
7. Connect On-site and Remote Attendees
Enable attendees to mingle and interact with their peers, hosts and other participants in one-on-one conversations, group discussions, and more.
Since networking is one of the most important reasons why events take place, a networking lounge has become an essential to provide peer-to-peer connection opportunities to remote attendees.
You can step it up a little and match attendees based on common interest with the help of AI matchmaking.
Conclusion
These are just a few suggestions to boost audience engagement during a hybrid event. Explore and experiment in your own hybrid event to see what works best, and the results will show.
Thinking about hosting hybrid events? Reach out to us and we will guide you through the end to end process of hosting amazing online events! Book a free Demo on Samaaro today!
About Samaaro
Samaaro is a powerful virtual and hybrid events platform that organizations have leveraged to host scalable and engaging events. Our reputed clients have hosted Virtual Exhibitions, Virtual Tradeshows, Hybrid summits, Hybrid trade shows, Virtual fairs, Hybrid conferences, Virtual awards ceremonies, and more on Samaaro. With a plethora of features, such as a powerful analytics dashboard, one-on-one and group chats/video calls, custom software integrations and more, Samaaro empowers you to host impactful virtual and hybrid events that effectively connect you with your global audience and achieve business milestones.
