The chat enables spontaneous comments and feedback. One challenge could be to warm up and encourage the usage of chat during webinars. To break the ice. Start with a fun and engaging activity, while keeping it profesional. For example, share an interesting number or fact and ask the audience to guess what it’s about. This not only grabs attention but also encourages participation right from the start. The presented fact can perhaps be communicated in another channel or in the webinar description to make it easy for the audience to initiate and lead to relevant answers. How to kick start a webinar using the chat: attention and pose a question to it.
Example: What is this? 44% of webinar attendees. Can anyone guess what this number represents? Type your guesses in the chat! Some of you may have seen this in our newsletter, but yeah 44% of webinar attendees feel disengaged in the middle of a webinar.
Keep the audience motivated by acknowledging the chat
It is easy to miss out on the chat. Try to find openings to acknowledge a chat post in your presentation. For example, you can use a chat message as a springboard to elaborate on a topic: Great point, [First Name]! Thanks for sharing. [Company names] take on this is...