Considerations When Hosting a Very Large Webinar Audience

As you know, webinars are very powerful tools to market your product or service. They give any business the chance to reach a much wider audience than was ever previously possible.

Most webinars start off with a few attendees. However, as time goes on and more and more people become engaged with your products, your webinar audience can become very large. In fact, webinar software now allows for thousands of people to attend! The largest ever webinar attendance was attended by over 10,000 people!

If you are planning to host a very large webinar audience, or if you have had problems in the past with large webinar audiences, what are some of the considerations that you should keep in mind when hosting one?

Here are some of the major considerations you should take into account when hosting a very large webinar audience.

Challenge of a Large Webinar Audience

One of the first considerations is that it is much harder to engage with a large audience than it is with a smaller one. Even though you can’t physically see everyone present (like you would delivering a conference in a large auditorium), the fact that hundreds or even thousands are present has its challenges.

For example, when you host a small webinar there are many opportunities to engage with a higher percentage of the attendees. However, that becomes impossible with a very large webinar audience.

Therefore, you should give consideration to how best to engage with your audience, especially with your Q&A session. Therefore, only have one-way audio and have the audience send in their questions in via chat.

Background Team

Obviously, you will not be able to host a very large webinar audience by yourself; therefore, having a good background team is essential. What kind of background team do you need?

The Presenter

If you have a large webinar audience, it is essential that you have an expert presenter. Your presenter should have experience in handling large audiences and know exactly how to keep the presentation running along smoothly.

Technical Producer

Your technical producer will be responsible for all the technical aspects of the webinar presentation. The producer doesn’t have to be physically present with the presenter. The technical producer is also responsible for providing assistance to those having technical difficulties. It’s also the producer’s job to organize muting and unmuting microphones of speakers.

It should also be the job of the technical producer to record the session and arrange for it to be distributed later.

Webinar Moderator

During the webinar presentation, you will need at least one moderator to monitor questions that come in via chat. Depending on the size of webinar and interest in the subject, you may need to have a small team.

The moderator should be grouping common themes together and sifting through questions to find the most interesting ones.

The moderator can also be used as the voice of the audience. So, at specified times, the moderator can ask the questions that have been received.

Keeping the Audience Engaged

With a good production team, it will be much easier to host your webinar. However, it can be a challenge to keep your audience engaged throughout the presentation. What are some of the basics to keep a large audience engaged?

Have an Expert Panel

Depending on the size of your audience and your webinar’s topic, you could have one or more expert panels. These are great ways to keep any size of audience engaged.

The panel will be able to express different viewpoints and discuss matters from all different angles.

Conduct a Poll

You should have polls during your webinar. When you have a large audience the need for polls is even greater than if you have a small audience. Why is this so?

The larger the audience then the more varied opinions you will have. This has an upside and a downside. The upside is that you can get a much better idea of what people are thinking about and what their opinion is. However, the downside is that you could be tempted to fragment the opinions too much. So, make sure that you have a few main topics or opinions that the audience can vote on.

Q&A

Moderating a Q&A session properly is very in a large-scale webinar. If you have a good team of moderators, then this shouldn’t be a problem. However, you may need to schedule for more time to host the Q&A session if your audience is very large.

Choose the Right Platform

Hosting a very large webinar also means that you need to make sure that your webinar software is up to the task. Some webinar platforms can only host a limited number of attendees.

You also have to think about the follow-up and make sure that your software can handle sending automated emails to thousands of people.