It’s criminal to host virtual events packed with back-to-back sessions that don’t offer attendees a moment to relax. But while icebreakers and games are common at traditional events, virtual event engagement activities take a bit more creativity.
As we’ve been hosting virtual events for the past few years, we know the value of a collaborative breakout session or fun trivia that cuts the monotony of a conference. That’s why vFairs has many virtual event engagement features that make every event fun, collaborative, and exciting.
Virtual Event Engagement Activities
Are you stuck figuring out how to make virtual attendees stay at the event longer without it feeling like a chore? This list of virtual engagement ideas for events is the answer.
1. Engage Your Audience on A Social Media Feed
You can engage your attendees at the event using social media. Encourage people to post their experiences on a selected social media platform. Use an app like Wall.io to integrate the ongoing social media feed into the virtual event platform.
Attendees can see what people are talking about and how they’re engaging with the event. Social media walls are great at helping attendees find out different activities and sessions they might have missed.
You can track event hashtags and collect user-generated content through this virtual event engagement feature. It will also offer an opportunity for the attendees to connect.
2. Host Q&A Sessions
Do you want to know how to engage the audience during a virtual presentation?
Virtual events often feature webinars. However, keeping the webinar audiences engaged is not always simple, as long information sessions can quickly get boring. An easy way to turn them into a two-way conversation is to use Q&As. They encourage virtual attendees to tune in more attentively and contribute.
vFairs offers highly interactive webinars that feature Q&As. The best part about this virtual event engagement feature is that you can moderate the Q&A section to make sure only relevant queries make it to the platform.
3. Conduct Trivia and Quizzes to Spark Competition
With the help of virtual engagement tools such as in-event trivia and quizzes, you can add an interesting element of competition to your engaging event. You can set up questions and quizzes on topics that the attendees are interested in. This virtual event engagement idea is great for testing their knowledge of industry-related topics.
vFairs also has an integration with the highly interactive trivia game, Kahoot! Kahoot! brings people with similar interests together in a game of trivia to see who comes out at the top. This game is integrated with a lot of vFairs events to add an element of friendly competition. It’s very popular amongst educators as a teaching tool as well.
4. Collect Votes with Polls
Polls during webinars let you take a pulse check on your attendees to see how they feel about the sessions, what their preferences are, and what they’d like to learn more about. There’s a lot of attendee information that polls can help you extract as attendees appreciate every opportunity to offer their input. You can also use the feedback from these virtual event engagement activities to optimize your speaker sessions.
5. Excite Your Audience With a Virtual Photo Booth
Who doesn’t like event memorabilia to take home? Taking fun photos at a photo booth is an easy way to do this. Attendees enjoy adding their pictures to the event photo wall as it gives them a sense of being part of the community. Also, these virtual photo booths are great for breaking monotony in between sessions. You can engage your remote audiences by offering branded photo templates and fun filters.
They can play around with those backgrounds and filters to make their photos stand out. Attendees can even like their favorite photos posted in the photo gallery. Such virtual team engagement activities help entice the interest of the event attendees. Plus, hosts can reuse these photos on social media to create some buzz during the event or even for post-event content activities.
6. Simulate a Networking Lounge with Spatial Connect
You can also bring more lifelike networking lounges to the virtual realm. vFairs spatial connect uses 3D simulation rooms to digitalize the physical networking experience. The avatars of each attendee can walk up to other people, tune in to their conversations, and make meaningful connections. It offers a dedicated space to join chatrooms, meet new people, and take a break from the event in a virtual environment.
7. Create Breakout Rooms for Discussions
You can create breakout rooms within your event webinars for virtual event engagement. It will create better discussion opportunities for attendees to dig deep into certain topics. These team engagement activities virtually provide a platform to help attendees brainstorm on industry topics or solve a problem.
8. Stimulate Your Audience with a Scavenger Hunt
Send attendees on a quest for clues! Hide items around an event and share a list of clues to find them. Each hidden item has a score attached to it. The more items an attendee finds, the more points they win. At the end of the event, the highest scorers can win prizes.
Use a scavenger hunt to send more attendee traffic to a gold sponsor’s booth by placing a hidden item there. You could also place them at the auditorium so more people end up attending a keynote session.
9. Spin the Wheel and Give Away Prizes
Looking for more audience participation ideas for virtual event giveaways? Use the customizable Spin the Wheel. Attach different values to each segment and choose what happens when the pointer lands on each of them. Such event gamification features can elevate the attendee experience and leave them with good memories from the event.
10. Host a Virtual Contest
Fun contests are one of the most unique virtual conference engagement ideas. You will need to promote a grand prize and create contest entry tickets. To host an ideal contest, think of ways your audience will feel engaged. It can be a simple user-generated content idea such as asking your attendees to share their pictures or pictures of their settings while attending your virtual conference.
The picture that gets the most amount of likes wins. Incorporate such short activities throughout the virtual event and assign points for participation.
11. Create a Leaderboard
With the help of a leaderboard, you can easily incentivize your attendees’ behavior by assigning them points. These points will be based on their participation during the event in keynote sessions, webinars, sponsor booths/exhibitor stands, surveys, chats, polls, Q&As, scavenger hunts, and more.
Be sure to award the winners. A giveaway at the end will have everyone waiting anxiously and extend the time they engage with your event as well.
12. Add A Live Feed to Your Event
Live feed offers an engaging and interactive platform for both attendees and booth administrators. Imagine it as a virtual social media feed, where real-time interaction takes center stage. Attendees can actively participate by sharing their thoughts, posting images, and commenting on each other’s posts.
Live feeds are great virtual events engagement tools where ideas are exchanged, questions are answered, and conversations come to life. Organizers can also access live feed reports on data including post titles, number of likes and comments, and names of attendees participating in the feed.
13. Foster Collaboration on Virtual Whiteboard
A platform where attendees can brainstorm different topics and get together to create something is one of the great ways to engage employees virtually. The vFairs platform integrates with Miro, a platform that lets attendees collaborate on an interactive whiteboard to share their ideas, and workshop projects, and plan activities together. The great thing is that it all happens on a video call so you can simulate group work. This type of virtual event engagement activity can elevate the connectivity of attendees.
Transform Your Virtual Events into Attendee Engagement Hubs
If you’re not getting a good response at your virtual events, it’s not that attendees don’t want to be at the event, it’s that they’re not feeling engaged and connected enough to stay. Increasing opportunities for virtual event engagement will benefit both you and your attendees in the end. Thinking out of the box and offering fun and valuable virtual engagement activities is your golden ticket. The vFairs event management platform offers several virtual event engagement features to help organizers keep the attendees awake and active throughout the event.
Still want more virtual event engagement ideas? Hear it from the event professionals.
