Image source – Freepik
The world has seen a tremendous shift in the ways of the corporate world. From sticking to a 9-to-5 routine, working with employees and teams, attending in-office meetings, and never imagining any other way of working to now working virtually. Be it the regular workday tasks, celebrations, or conferences, everything has shifted to the virtual space.
Conferences have changed greatly. Not just the event itself, but also the way offices are planning them. There was a time when planning a conference would take up to a week – clearing schedules, making arrangements, and prepping for pitches.
While the importance of holding conferences remains unaltered, virtual conferences have taken over to suit the current corporate lifestyle.
The benefits of virtual conferences are extremely moving and are emerging in ways that were not understood before. In this blog, we will present to you a few compelling ideas, tips, and practices to make your virtual conference stand out.
Tips To Host An Outstanding Virtual Conference
Events like conferences are social affairs where people often come together to discuss business achievements and expectations. Conferences are known to be stuffed with statistics, graphs, and numbers. It is difficult to keep the attendees interested and undistracted during tedious conferences, held virtually.
Here are a few effective tips to remember while hosting your next virtual conference:
1. Use Event Management Tools
Hosting a virtual conference takes a lot of time and effort. Even though the event is held virtually, there are many important factors to consider.
The hosts have to look after the conference attendees list, registrations, schedule clearances, and make sure there are no technical glitches while the conference takes place.
These factors might sound like simple tasks but a considerable amount of time goes into making the event look flawless. To achieve that, you can use event management tools and host the most impressive virtual event.
There are various tools that cater to virtual events.
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Use An Efficient Platform
Hosting a virtual conference requires a ton of technical investment. It is extremely crucial to invest in an efficient platform to host your virtual conference. According to statistics, 38% of virtual event organizers regularly encounter technical problems
Once you have a better understanding of your event and know your targets and goals, you can easily determine what kind of virtual event you are going to host.
There are many tools that can simply allow you to video stream, some have more options like casting a new screen if you want your event to be interactive or just a session where the audience is simply just listeners.
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A Twitter Wall
Another amazing way to make any virtual conference experience exceptional is by displaying an attractive Twitter wall at the conference.
A Twitter wall is a personalized feed of social content aggregated from Twitter with the help of a social media aggregation tool.
Image source – Taggbox
With the help of a Twitter wall, you can engage with the displayed UGC (User-Generated Content) such as tweets posted by users, pictures, videos, and comments, branded content (content posted by the brand itself), and the latest updates about the event in real-time.
It is an amazing way to spark conversations, creating an engaging event and keeping the audience from getting distracted. More so, a Twitter wall can also be a source of entertainment during your event and can help to increase the number of UGC for any event.
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Tools To Boost Event Engagement
Event engagement is hard to achieve during formal events. Especially, if they are virtual with zero social interaction. There are many tools that help event hosts to boost engagement during events by making it possible to participate in/host activities during conferences.
You can allow attendees to give suggestions, cast their votes in polls, and participate in Q&A rounds. All of it, you can host with the help of an impressive event engagement tool.
2. Hire Conference Planning Services
If you have big goals and expectations from your conference, it is time to take your conference planning to the next level. Great things take greater efforts, which is why, you need to plan your conference on a larger scale.
Image source – Freepik
But managing all the arrangements single-handedly can get extremely tedious. Hiring a conference planning service can be a real game-changer for your virtual conference.
By hiring a conference, you can work with a dedicated team to help you find conference sponsors, planning services, and resources to make your virtual conference a huge hit.
3. Integrate Social Media
It is easy to get distracted during virtual events. We understand that. Events are supposed to be social affairs and it sounds rather difficult to achieve during a virtual conference.
Conferences are anyway formal events, and hosting them virtually cuts the slightest chance of making them engaging and interactive.
However, there is one way through which hosts can merge the digital with social. And that is social media.
Image source – Taggbox
Event hosts can display an Instagram wall at conferences and make their virtual conferences 3x more entertaining, attractive, and engaging.
Hosts can create an Instagram wall with the help of a social media aggregator and display tool. It allows users to collect content from Instagram and create a personalized feed from the content and display it during virtual events. Hosts can display social content and branded content on the wall, and use it furthermore to host fun activities as well.
4. Invite Popular Speakers & Guests
Popular guests tend to attract more attendees to virtual events, as people are more likely to tune in if they know a well-known figure will be present.
Having renowned sponsors, speakers or guests can help establish credibility for your event and organization, as it suggests that you have a strong network of contacts and are able to attract high-profile individuals for your conference can help you have more budget for your event.
This means, more possibility to come up with creative ideas and coming up with an attractive addition for your conference – like a popular speaker.
Having a popular personality as a speaker at your event is a top-tier way to boost the attendance rate for your conference. Any event’s incomplete without a good number of attendees which is crucial for a successful event.
Conclusion
Hosting a virtual conference is a series of tedious tasks. However, if planned efficiently, you can achieve all your conference goals without any difficulty, and with these virtual conference practices, you have the best tips to make your virtual conference a great success.
Guest article written by:
Saurabh Sharma is a Digital Marketing Executive at Taggbox, a leading UGC platform. He has three years of experience in the Information Technology industry. He spends his time reading about new trends in Digital Marketing and the latest technologies.