5 expert tips to boost your online presentation skills

At Mentimeter, presentations are our thing. Over the past year, we’ve collected our top tips to really boost your virtual presentations. Let’s get started! 

1. Engage the audience and build a connection 

The best way to deliver an awesome presentation is to get the audience involved. Not only will this boost their attention but it will help to build a connection between the presenter and the audience which is key to making it a memorable experience. Interactive questions and fun quizzes are great to really give the audience a chance to share their opinions as well as make it fun!

2. Add stunning visuals to capture attention

As people get more and more tired with online meetings and presentations the task of trying to energize them and capture their attention gets even harder. With Mentimeter our specially curated slides means you can easily create beautiful slide decks in seconds. Add Video Slides to break up the talking, images and fun gifs as well as other different content slides to break the monotony.

3. Interact with your audience

Being accessible and allowing the audience to interact with you is crucial to making a presentation valuable. Opening up for a Q&A session is a perfect way to enable participants to pose questions, clarify ideas, and solve any misunderstandings. The Q&A Slide can be used to create a dedicated time to answer questions, but if you want to maintain constant interaction, enable Q&A on all slides so that when a question comes to mind, it can be answered. Interactivity encourages the audience to be part of the conversation, creates meaningful discussions, and helps to build a good rapport with attendees. 

In general, people have a short attention span. Be sure to add some interactive elements every 10 minutes or so before the audience get distracted and drift off. With Mentimeter you can enable Comments from Audience and emoji reactions to create a bridge between the screen and the attendees. Not only does this give an energizing boost to the presenter when you see loves hearts and praise coming in but the audience love it too. 

4. Keep it simple

We’ve all been there and experienced the dreaded video fatigue. However, keeping your slides simple, not overwhelming the audience with too much text and not talking for too long without involving attendees is important to keep your audience engaged and interested. Avoid filling the screen with text and instead highlight the most important information in bullet points. If you have a noteworthy quote, the Quote Slide is a different way to display content. Only a minimal amount of text is needed to reinforce and support what you are saying and make the presentation much easier to follow.

5. Reflect afterwards

In order to continuously improve reflecting is key. Reflect on the questions asked, on how the attendees felt during the session, how useful it was and on how well you thought you did. Using Mentimeter to send a survey after a session is perfect to collect extra information that you can then use to improve for next time. Or you could even reflect live to wrap up the presentation and ensure maximum responses. 

At Mentimeter we know firsthand how it can be challenging and daunting to present online. We’ve collected some of the best presentation tips whether online or face-to-face to help you excel in your next presentation. Or, if you are hosting a virtual meeting find out how you can make them more interactive and effective here.