Polls, Q&A and chat: getting your webinar audience to take part

On a webinar you are talking to a screen. Nobody nods, nobody laughs, nobody in the front row raises a hand. Your viewers are at home or at their desks, with their inbox, their phone and a dozen tabs open next to you. The moment they feel they can do something else while you talk, they will.

Polls, questions and chat are how you pull them back. When a viewer clicks an answer or types a question, they stop being a listener and become part of the session. This article goes through each tool, when to use it, and how to avoid overdoing it.

Why participation matters

There are three good reasons to care. Viewers who take part stay longer, because every time you ask them to do something you bring their attention back to the screen. You also learn about your audience: a single poll can tell you who is watching and what they care about, and you can adjust the rest of the session on the spot. And the questions people ask are the best material you will ever get for your next piece of content, because they are exactly what your audience wants to know.

The first five minutes

If nobody has typed anything in the first few minutes, it gets much harder to get them started later. So ask for something small right at the beginning, something that needs no thought:

• "Tell us in the chat where you're watching from."
• "Type 1 if you can hear me clearly."
• A one-question poll: "How long have you been working in this field?"

It seems minor, but it teaches the audience that this is a session where they are expected to write. Someone who has typed once will type again. Read a few answers out loud, with names. People like hearing their name, and it shows everyone else that someone is actually reading.

Polls: when and how

A useful poll does one of two jobs. It helps you understand the room, or it gets viewers thinking about the topic. A poll that does neither is just an interruption.

A few guidelines:

• Keep the question short, with three or four answers. Faced with eight options, people skip it.
• Ask something people can answer in a few seconds.
• Say what you're doing with the result. "Most of you are just starting out, so I'll cover the basics first." That shows the audience their answer changed something.
• Roughly one poll every fifteen minutes is plenty. More than that starts to feel like a test.

Write your polls before the webinar, with the exact wording, and know where in the talk each one goes. Typing a poll while you're live is a reliable way to create an awkward silence.

Questions and answers

Q&A is the part many viewers wait for, and often the part hosts handle worst. You can take questions throughout or save them for the end. Both work. What matters is telling the audience up front which it is: "Send questions any time. I'll answer some as we go and the rest at the end."

Some things that help:

• Keep questions separate from the chat. In their own list they don't get lost among the hellos and the "is the sound OK?" messages.
• Read each question aloud before answering. Some viewers didn't see it, and on the recording nobody will know what you're responding to.
• Mark questions as answered, so you and the audience can see what's still open.
• If nobody asks anything at the end, have two questions ready. "One thing I get asked a lot is..." opens the door, and others usually follow.

For the questions you don't get to, promise to answer them by email, and then do it. It's also a natural reason to get back in touch after the session. There's more on that in what to do after a webinar.

When the chat is silent

Sometimes you ask a question and nothing comes back. It happens, especially with an audience that doesn't know you yet. Don't panic, and don't fill the gap by talking faster. Some ways to wake the chat up:

• Ask closed questions. "Who here has tried this? Type yes or no" is much easier to answer than "What do you think?"
• Wait. Ten seconds of silence feels endless to you, but it's a fair amount of time for someone to type.
• Ask a colleague to post the first message. Once there's one message in the chat, the second is easier to write.

When the chat is too busy

The opposite problem is real too. With a large or excited audience, the chat can move too fast to read, and now and then someone joins just to advertise or cause trouble. It helps to know your controls in advance: deleting a message, slowing the chat so each viewer can only post every few seconds, or closing it for a few minutes when you need quiet.

The most useful advice here is not to handle it alone. Presenting while reading the chat, picking questions and launching polls is a lot for one person. If you have a co-host or an assistant, give them that job. They answer the technical questions, pass you the good ones, and launch polls at the right moment.

Bringing a viewer on screen

The strongest way to involve your audience is to let one of them speak. A viewer who comes on screen to share their experience, or to ask a question in their own voice, changes the feel of the session. It stops being a lecture and becomes a conversation.

• Choose who comes up. Someone who already wrote something interesting in the chat is a good bet.
• Tell them beforehand what you want to ask, so they aren't caught off guard.
• Keep it short. Two or three minutes, then thank them and send them back to the audience.

If your webinar is built around an interview, the same habits apply. Our guide on how to interview a podcast guest was written for podcasts, but most of it works on a webinar too.

Don't overdo it

Too much participation is a thing. If there's a poll every three minutes, viewers start to feel they're being managed rather than taught. Interaction should serve the content: a poll that tells you something, a question that clears up a point, a viewer who brings a real example. A poll that exists only to "keep people awake" usually feels exactly like that.

If you're planning a session from scratch, plan the moments of interaction together with the content. Our article on a webinar structure that sells shows one way to fit them in.

After the broadcast

The chat, the questions and the poll results are also data. Go through them afterwards. Which questions came up more than once? When did the chat come alive, and when did it go quiet? How did people answer the polls? That's where your next topic comes from, along with the questions for your FAQ page and sometimes the idea for a course.

Try it without committing

The Kolcast webinar room has polls, questions you can mark as answered, and a chat you can moderate, slow down or close. You can give an operator their own link to run the chat and polls behind the scenes, and any questions nobody answered are emailed to you after the broadcast. To see it from the audience's side, there's a live demo broadcast, and the full feature list is on the webinars page.