An urgent Slack message from the team. A text from the family back home. A constant humming noise from the back of the room.
It’s so easy for people to get distracted at events.
It doesn't matter if it’s an in-person, virtual, or hybrid event. Limited attention spans means limited tolerance for anything that attendees find boring, irrelevant, or not valuable.
So while it might be impossible to completely eliminate those distractions, you do have control over how engaging your events are. And the more engaging your events, the easier it’ll be for attendees to overlook those distractions.
Before we look at nine ways to boost engagement during your events, let’s revisit what audience engagement is.
Audience engagement is how active and happy your attendees are with your events. Connecting with other attendees on LinkedIn, participating in Q&A, and taking the post-event survey are all examples of audience engagement.
Audience engagement is more than attendee interaction, though. Things like how long they spend at your event, if they subscribe to your content afterwards, and if they register for another event are all other ways they show long-term engagement.
How can you execute an event that promotes engagement while on-site? This article will answer that question.
If you’ve created pre-event engagement opportunities, you should already be on the right track for the on-site event experience.
People are ready to attend, enjoy themselves, and make connections.
But once they’re there, you need to keep the momentum going. Here are nine ways to increase audience engagement during the event:
Use a mobile check-in app. Once you’re on-site, the pressure is on — you have to make a good first impression. Attendees hate standing in a long line or dealing with slow check-in processes.
In the mid-2010s, I was managing a team of event professionals. Event technology existed — we just didn’t prioritize it. (This was before my time at Splash.)
We hosted around 10 VIP events every year, including golf tournaments where foursomes were chosen at random. This meant our attendee list was in a spreadsheet with names that were not even alphabetized. To check people in, we relied on Control + F. And it was horrible. Looking back, it’s shocking that we actually did it that way for years.
The lesson: If you’re still using a spreadsheet to check people in, it’s time for an upgrade to a mobile check-in app.
Leverage vertical video. Do people still live tweet? Is it even still called tweeting? Maybe that still works for you, and that’s great.
Another tactic to try is vertical video. Share short-form video content using things like Instagram Reels, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts. Even LinkedIn has a short-form video feature in beta.
Connect attendees with an event app. When you’re hosting a large event, like an annual user group or brand summit, give your audience the chance to chat with their peers through messaging.
Event apps can do a lot more than just improve audience engagement. They can also support effective on-site communications with push notifications and wayfinding features.
Plus, people love sharing their photos on an event-specific social feed.
Start conversations online. One thing we love doing on our regular Splash webinars is hosting a raffle where attendees have the chance to win something if they comment on a specific LinkedIn post.
The question we pose is always related to the webinar topic and is a great way to share ideas and get conversations going.
This could also work for in-person events. Sending your attendees to LinkedIn while on-site can support social sharing from your event. Plus, they can find other attendees to form long-term connections.
Caveat: Designate someone on your team to keep an eye on comments. You don’t want them going unanswered.
Let your attendees get creative. Have a place where your attendees can take shareable photos. This could be a photo booth, but doesn’t have to be.
Maybe there are a few photo-worthy spots built into your venue, or maybe you can make those happen with a few decorations.
Launch polls to tailor your content. Ask your attendees questions that’ll help you have more customized conversations on-site. (This works great for both virtual and in-person events.)
Polls also often give you more information that you can use in post-event content and communications. For example, if the majority of your audience says they all have the same challenge, you could host another event or create a piece of content that helps them overcome that specific challenge.
Keep session duration in mind. Some reports have shown that the shorter the events, the better. That could be true, but you know your audience better than anyone else. Understand how long they’re willing to spend with you.
If you have good content and highly engaged speakers, you may not have to stress about keeping your event short.
Get attendees involved in the sessions. Make sure you or your speakers aren’t the only ones talking. This may be difficult if you have a lot of content or an attendee group of introverts. Some ideas:
Use what you know from pre-event engagement. If you add one or two custom questions on your registration form, use them to customize your event content and conversations. If you address topics that your attendees requested to talk about, they’ll be more likely to stay engaged.
People are easily distracted, especially when they’re in a room full of people and have constant access to their phones.
This makes on-site audience engagement a tough challenge to crack. But if you can, people will remember you as the company that hosts incredible events. If you can’t, you probably won’t get a second chance.
And even when you’ve captured their attention for the whole event, your work doesn’t end there.
Next step: Make sure you have a foolproof post-event engagement strategy in place.
