With today’s multitasking work styles and short attention spans, it’s essential to plan meetings and presentations so you grab and hold your audience’s attention. You need to allow enough time for each section, as well as for the entire event. This is especially important to avoid those “drop outs” who become bored quickly.
It’s your job to make your event interesting and interactive, with enough breaks to keep the energy high. Before we give you some proven tips and tricks, let’s check out…
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We asked Marta Eichstaedt, webinar expert, business coach/consultant, and certified online trainer, how she determined the proper length. This is what she advised us:
“The length of a webinar depends on the goal we want to achieve. There are, however, some rules and techniques that apply. In general, when used as marketing tools, webinars should last between 30 and 60 minutes. This length should take into account time for interaction with your audience.
Training events can last longer. For example, I organize online workshops for trainers who want to run their own online training series. These workshops take 90 minutes and the whole course includes 7 meetings. The attendee group is really small (maximum 6 people) and there is a lot of interaction and activities performed by the attendees themselves. However, even with highly interactive workshops, I wouldn’t recommend exceeding two hours per session.
Another example is an extended conference like the Social Media Success Summit which comprises 4 weeks of training in weekly or biweekly webinars, each lasting about 45 minutes. They hold three webinars a day, with 20-minute breaks. The whole event is about 20 different webinars altogether and this format turns out to work best for this topic and audience.”
After hearing from the experts and, based on our own experience, we can conclude that webinars typically last around 60 minutes – about the length of an installment of your favorite TV series. This also makes it easy to fit in most of your attendees’ calendars.
The crucial thing is to plan your content so that it’s interesting and allows enough time to cover the essential topics and activities. And practice! Here are some tips to consider:
There are as many date/time preferences as there are people, so it’s best to use your own judgment and follow a few common-sense rules. And always think about your audience first.
All in all, there’s something in the maxim about writing that could also apply to webinars: A skirt should be long enough to cover everything, but short enough to make it interesting. 🙂
Have any experience regarding today’s subject? Share it with us in the comments.
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