Engage Your Webinar Attendees Better with Raise Hand, Allow to Talk, Broadcast Message, and Instant Polls

As webinars start to replace marketing events, educational workshops, and conventional classrooms, webinar hosts need to be empowered with tools that can help engage their audience better. Presenters must be able to ask spontaneous questions and collect responses from attendees quickly, just like in a real-life training session. To help webinar hosts do this, Zoho Meeting is introducing four new features: Raise Hand, Allow to Talk, Broadcast Message, and Instant Polls.

Though attendee engagement is a major deciding factor in the success of any webinar, so far the only forms of engagement that attendees had were mostly limited to Q&A, Polls and Change Presenter. The newly added Zoho Meeting features should encourage more interactions between webinar hosts and attendees.

 Raise Hand

Attendees can use Raise Hand to get the attention of the webinar organizer and co-organizers during a webinar. This is an open-ended feature that can be used according to the discretion of the webinar organizer. Organizers can instruct the audience to use Raise Hand if the organizer needs to slow down, to ask questions, or when attendees need to speak using Allow to Talk. It can also be used to to signal technical issues during the webinar or conduct impromptu polls. For example, the organizer can tell the attendees to click Raise Hand if they agree (or disagree) with a statement. Learn how to use the Raise Hand feature.

 Allow to Talk

Encourage better participation from your audience by giving them the opportunity to speak in your webinar. With Allow to Talk, attendees can ask questions verbally and get answers directly from the organizer or co-organizers, reducing the time spent typing questions in the Q&A section. This will also help the organizer avoid answering repeated questions from attendees as everyone in the webinar will be able to hear the attendee and the organizer. It will be captured in webinar recordings as well.

 Broadcast Messages

Webinar presenters sometimes need to display and share texts with attendees, just like how a trainer uses a blackboard in a physical classroom. Organizers and co-organizers can now send words, texts, terms, impromptu poll questions, reference links, or the main points of the webinar presentation using Broadcast Message. Attendees will be able to copy the messages sent by the organizer. 

Create instant polls during a webinar

Organizers can now create and launch Instant Polls during a webinar. Frame questions based on the nature of your audience and get useful insights. View results instantly or download webinar reports to analyze results better. 

Let co-organizers launch webinars

Add co-organizers to your webinar and let them launch webinars even in the absence of the organizer. This can help avoid delays if the organizer is away on an emergency or unable to start the webinar. However, only co-organizers who are members of your organization can start webinars in this manner. All co-organizers (both organization members and external contacts) can launch polls, answer questions, allow an attendee to speak, or make someone a presenter.

 Add webinars to calendar

Attendees can now add webinars to Google and Yahoo calendars from the relevant options in the webinar registration page or the registration confirmation email. This will increase their chances of attending a webinar as it will be added to their daily schedule. They can also add webinars to other calendars like Outlook by downloading the .ics file.

Try out these updates the next time you conduct a webinar. Keep the feedback coming by writing to us at support@zohomeeting.com or commenting below.

 We hope you enjoy using Zoho Meeting.