Three Key Aspects of a Successful Virtual Event in the Post-COVID Era

Paired with the release of our 2022 Virtual Events, Solutions Review surveyed our audience of business software buyers and practitioners to find out what they care most about when considering whether to attend a virtual event. We tapped into a sub-section of our audience of 10 million enterprise IT professionals on LinkedIn via the platform’s polling feature over a 6-week period to generate the results. We asked more than 240 respondents to vote on their preferred virtual event features, platform, and length.

With in-person conferences largely on hold, Solutions Review has organized more than a dozen successful virtual events across data and analytics, cybersecurity, ERP and BPM, data protection, and cloud computing over the last two years. Solutions Review plans to use the insights generated from our most recent polling to expand and enhance our capabilities as we enter 2022.

With these things in mind, here’s what we learned:

Live Q&A is Essential

When we asked our audience what the most important feature of a virtual event is to them, 54 percent said live Q&A with the audience. With more than half of those polled choosing this option, we can see just how crucial audience interaction is during virtual events. According to respondents, the second-most sought-after feature of virtual events was the platform where the stream takes place. That led us to our next poll question.

The Crowd Prefers a Private Webinar

57 percent of respondents selected private webinar when asked where their preferred place to stream a virtual event was. Virtual event attendees prefer to stream through Zoom, WebEx, and other private webinar platforms. YouTube was also represented as a preferred live stream venue, garnering 26 percent of the votes while LinkedIn Live and Twitter don’t seem to be as popular.

The Ideal Virtual Event is One Hour or Less

We then asked our audience how long they prefer virtual events to be, and 57 percent of those polled responded by selecting one hour as their ideal amount of time while 33 percent prefer virtual events to be 30-minutes or less. With only a small selection (10 percent) of votes preferring virtual events of 2 hours or more, we can see business software buyers and practitioners prefer shorter live streams.

With the information gathered from our universe of influence over the last several weeks, we have uncovered what a professional audience values when it comes to virtual events. We plan to utilize these results to make the most of our audience’s time by focusing on shorter, interactive events hosted on popular private webinar platforms.

If you would like to keep tabs on our virtual event calendar or apply for a feature during one of our upcoming live streams, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn or visit our events page. And be sure to participate in our third-annual Insight Jam during Best Practices Week in December!