It’s cool and scary: Your webinar/webcast audience could be joining you from an iPad. Or a phone. Are you ready?

Today’s guest post comes from industry veteran Dan Roche, Vice President of Marketing at TalkPoint Communications.

 

Five Tips for Improving the Effectiveness of Mobile Webcasts

The TalkPoint team has been talking a lot lately about mobile webcasting, its evolution over the past year, and the exponential growth of this platform in 2012 and beyond. To help our customers through this transition, we have developed five tips to make their mobile webcasts more effective.

Get your content and design house in order

Consider the mobile device screen size when developing webcast content. Don’t overload the slides being presented or mobile viewers, especially those using smartphones, may have difficulty digesting the message you are trying to relay.

Emphasize key elements

Although mobile webcasts provide both audio and visual elements, viewers may be accessing the webcast from a variety of locations (e.g. while traveling, in a crowded or busy location, etc.) and may only be listening to the webcast. Therefore, it’s important to highlight important components of your presentation more than once so that “viewers” will be able to recall the main points from the event.

Also, if there is more than one speaker on a webcast event, ensure that the moderator announces who is speaking so that there isn’t confusion over who is providing commentary.

Simplify the registration process

Mobile registrants are typing on a small keyboard, so limiting the data that needs to be entered to join an online event will make it faster and easier for viewers.

Get inside the head of the social media attendee

Social media is a great way to promote a webcasting event. The use of interactive social media “sharing” buttons is particularly effective for mobile webcasts. However, active social media elements like Twitter feeds or Facebook postings can lead to multitasking by the viewer.

Consider your viewer’s screen size, and thoughtfully incorporate interactive social media elements so viewers can fully engage in all aspects of the mobile webcast.

Make sure your webcast is viewable by the mobile-enabled

Provide mobile webcasting viewers with a link to watch/review the webcast at a later date. This provides webcast attendees with another opportunity to access the material from the event.