Imagine attending a webinar that seems endless? Painful right? This will help you understand that even if you have a lot to say, you can’t ramble on! Connecting people online is probably one of the coolest things technology has made possible. Especially for big-shot marketing enterprises, educational institutes, and other organizations, webinars are nothing less than a boon to generate leads and connect with people.
However, as interesting as it may sound, our attention span plays a great role in such webinars and meetings. Yes, it may get a little tough to go more than an hour without yawning at least once in a meeting. So, what exactly should the perfect webinar last? How long before you start losing your audiences’ attention to their fantasy world? There are a few deciding factors that will make your sessions effective and length is one of them.
How Does a Webinar Work?
The main purpose of creating and hosting a webinar is to expand the brand’s reach beyond a restricted area. This is usually done by providing a unique insight into a topic or product that the audience was probably not aware of. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, understanding the webinar definition can help clarify how these online presentations function and what makes them so effective. Addressing their questions and doubts in such a manner that your brand leaves a lasting impression on them. It is definitely a combination of presentation, social skill, length, delivery, and audiences’ engagement.
Ideal Length for Webinars
Ideally, research shows that a webinar should last anywhere between sixty to ninety minutes. Now you know why your classes and lectures lasted an hour! God knows how annoying some of those were! Jokes apart, webinars are one of the most powerful ways to connect with people worldwide. Therefore, it is even more important to stick to a specified length. Now, the important question, why sixty to ninety minutes?
1. Attention Span
Unless it’s a thriller movie that instantly grabs the audience’s attention, we rarely stick to a seat for 2 hours straight, eyes hooked to the screen. This is because focusing the human mind on a single thing for too long is a tough job. The concentration power of a human mind normally lasts for twenty to thirty minutes. People are bound to slowly lose their concentration from whatever they are doing without even realizing it.
Therefore, hosting an extremely long webinar will result in a distracted audience and therefore, little productivity. Even your amazing social skills will not be able to hold their attention for more than one hour.
2. Content Delivery
What’s the difference between boring college lectures and online webinars? Content and it’s delivery! You may wonder how this is related to the length. Well, for everyone who remembers, not all classes and not all professors were equally interesting. While some lectures felt like only a couple of minutes long, other lectures felt like a lifetime.
If someone attends your webinar, you know that they are at least interested in what you have to say. In this case, your work becomes a little easier. However, if someone is there for an experience or not of their own accord, you’ll have to be very conscious of how extended is your delivery. Will you be able to connect with the audience easily, or will it take a little extra time? A lot of this depends on perception. However, one hour should give you sufficient time to connect, if you have the right skills and knowledge.
3. Avoid Dropouts
While it wasn’t easy to bunk physical lectures, webinar dropout is just one click away. This is why an optimal length will prevent those easily distracted people to leave the site mid-session. Everyone sits through the sessions with a time frame in mind. If you’re going to extend it more than 15 minutes, you’ll notice many people leaving the session. Hence, maintaining a time frame that works for both you and your audience is the best way to create a good impression and arrange another follow-up webinar again sometime later.
How to Choose the Best Webinar Length?
While we have looked at why choosing an optimal length is necessary, we also need to decide the ideal time frame for our goals. Webinars can be conducted for training meetings, marketing, and educational purposes.
A brand awareness webinar may run ion a tight time frame, considering the marketing skills and audiences’ interest. On the other hand, a training meeting can go on a little longer compared to marketing strategies. Moreover, choosing an appropriate webinar platform also plays an important role in a successful session.
Some platforms allow you a limited duration for conducting a meeting, while others are available with better software solutions. Livewebinar.com, for example, has a capacity of hosting a meeting for up to 1500 people and comes with advanced API solutions. In fact, they also provide a customized webinar platform to companies for an effortless session. The unlimited integration using API on an external platform and white label solutions will also provide you with a unique experience in conducting professional training sessions, raising awareness, and customer support.
Conduct Webinars Effectively
Again, there is no definite time-frame for conducting webinars. Webinars depend on a lot of things. The context, for example, can be vastly topics or short ones with little explanation. However, a standard duration can help you draw up an easier path in conducting the webinars more comfortably. A webinar usually consists of three main parts-
- Introduction- between five to seven minutes.
- The core presentation conducted for 45 minutes to one hour.
- Q&A session for 15 minutes or so.
The question and answer session also plays an important role in webinars. So make sure you don’t run out of the data or face any network issues. This will disrupt the flow of the session.
Overview
As you know now, there is no hard and fast rule for setting the timing for webinars. However, the ideal timing can be decided based on the format of the presentation. People invest their time and energy in attending the webinar. It becomes your responsibility to provide value to their time.
