June 15, 2023

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Online presentations are an integral part of the online teams' workflow. With the help of technology, it is now possible to reach more people and make online presentations either from home or from the office. However, to make your webinars or conference calls successful you need to consider the challenges of connecting with a virtual audience. It may seem that there are no differences between in-person and online presentations. However, in fact, they require different approaches to keep viewers engaged.

A typical conference room in the office is a controlled environment where participants get less distracted than in virtual meeting rooms. During online presentations attendees may switch off cameras and microphones and do other tasks without anyone even knowing. Thus, to keep your audience engaged follow these 10 tips for delivering great online presentation:

Be simple

Keep your slides simple. Avoid complicated graphics, animation and too many words. Participants of the conference will not perceive the information if you show them overloaded slides. Place the text in the center and make high contrast slides.

Make it brief

Avoid overwhelming your audience with too many slides. Try to divide your presentation into three parts. If you still have a lot of useful material, schedule another meeting. Otherwise, your participants will easily zone out.

Think about the structure

A well-structured presentation is easier to follow and understand. It is important not to overload your slides with images and text as well as the whole presentation with information. Three elements per slide will be easy to read and understand. Those can be elements of the bullet list, images, etc.

Be well-prepared

Before you go online and start talking in front of your audience, screen record yourself. You can practice everything in the comfort of your home and check how the participants will see you. While rehearsing you need to pay attention to the following:

• Your body language
• The volume of your voice and its confidence
• Technical issues
• The time limit

Start with a strong hook

First impressions always count. The way you start your presentation will either keep your audience engaged or disinterested. A hook is a tactic for opening presentations. It helps to immediately capture the audience's attention and make everyone listen to what is being said. A good hook should be brief, catchy and well-rehearsed. Here are a couple of ideas for great presentation hooks:

• Start with a rhetorical question
• Use a surprising or amazing fact
• Refer to a relevant historical event
• Use the word "imagine"
• Quote proverbs or business leaders
• Tell a story

Pay attention to the lightning

Avoid sitting with a bright window behind you as this will make you look dark. Have the window or lamp set behind your laptop.

Make eye contact

Making eye contact during online presentations is one of the most complicated tasks. You should all the time bear in mind that you need to look at a camera rather than at a screen. The ideal position is to sit straight at the arm's length from the screen.

Take advantage of visuals

The easiest way to have your information remembered is to use visuals during the presentation. Images in presentations help to remember 65% of the information 3 days later while with simple text this rate drops to 10%.

Engage your audience with help of interactions

Many online presentations are really boring because they lack interactions. Here are some ideas which will help to keep your audience engaged:

• Host quizzes and polls
• Ask questions

This technique will help you not only keep your audience engaged, but also will give you an opportunity to collect useful and valuable information.

Use reliable presentation tools

There are a lot of tools for hosting online presentations. Virola corporate messenger supports screen sharing and allows showing slides during conference calls. However, to create a professional presentation you need to use reliable tools such as:

• Pixabay to find images
• Canva to create infographics, logos, etc
• Keynote to design presentations
• Poll Everywhere to create live polls
• Krisp to mute background noise