Zoom Presentation Tips To Engage Your Audience, From a Zoom Presenter
3 things I’m secretly grateful recently:
1. Haven’t styled my hair in 6 months
2. Haven’t worn dress pants and shoes in 1 year
3. Enjoying Zoom trainings (and like to think I’ve done a decent job delivering them). If it helps, here’s some strategies that have served me well.
1. Positioning is key
Big mistake — Most presenters only have their face and neck visible in trainings.
That reduces the impact of your delivery. A lot.
I’ve done Zoom trainings both while standing and seated, and always make it a point to position the laptop camera to ensure my upper torso (up to chest level) is visible. Why?
So that I can gesture with my hands and it can be seen. Allowing me to impact them both with my voice and my body.
Given the nature of online meetings, some of the energy and excitement in your tone will be slightly watered down by the time it comes out from your audience’s audio output — Headphones or not.
So you can do one of two things — either overcompensate by raising your voice more (which is unsustainable if you’re gonna deliver long trainings)…
Or you learn to make your arms and body visible, so you can use them.
With proper positioning, you can use your hands to point directly at the camera, wave, mime your words. Or any other creative actions you can do with your hands.
Classic rule: Effective communication is 55% visual, 38% tonality, and 7% verbal.
If you don’t position properly to use your body, your impact will be more diluted than the iced milo from Mcdelivery. Regardless of how strong your message is.
2. Share, Un-share, Spotlight
Zoom makes it smooth where you can share your screen/ slides in a second. Love it.
Definitely living up to their mission statement of “Making communication frictionless”.
But as a trainer/ speaker, do NOT get lazy and share your screen the whole time.
A rule of thumb I have for myself is I should be in screen share mode 50% of the time, and the other 50% of the time I’m not.
Simple reason — my face looks bigger when I am NOT sharing my screen. Making me “come alive” more.
Oh wait, I missed something.
To make your face take up the whole screen on the audience’s laptop, you gotta use the “Spotlight” feature… Which can also be activated in just 2 clicks.
Now you might be wondering: “But my presentation requires me to be on slides the whole time. How do I do this?”
My answer would be to work the other way and create your presentation based off this requirement — Have segments within your delivery where you can stop share to give an example, tell a story, or even do a discussion.
Even if every slide is important, there will be some slides where you will need elaboration isn’t it?
When you expand on a point and give anecdotes, stop the screen share and spotlight yourself. So your message will have a greater impact.
But isn’t this a hassle you ask? To share and unshare. It’s so much effort.
My answer — your role as a speaker is not just to deliver a message. It’s to make sure your message gets taken home. Put in the effort.
And secondly, you have multiple people giving you hours of their precious time. That is something to respect and not take lightly. They have given you their attention, so be deserving of it.
True story on how powerful this strategy has been for my audience — After doing this for a while and conditioning them to enjoy “full screen mode”, I’ve even had multiple occurrences where the audience reminds me in the chat box to stop my screen share so they can experience the class in “maximum”, when I sometimes get too engrossed in telling stories that I forgot to do so.
Of course, don’t overdo or it becomes annoying. You need to calibrate.
3. Take up space
If you can learn to do this, you will stand out in Zoom when presenting.
Regular speakers merely talk and speak from a fixed position.
Even if their torsos can be seen and they’re using their hands to gesture, many do not realize there is so much more room around them to utilize.
Up, Down, Left, Right, Diagonal, Front, Back.
Because of the nature of Zoom meetings, and them being seated, they become naturally constrained in an imaginary “box”.
Break out of that.
I do this by moving my face super close to the camera until my whole face fills up their screen (cut off at my forehead), when I wanna tell them something “interesting”. So I inch in and speak “closer” to them.
It can make them slightly uncomfortable, and the tension is strong… Then I back off and ease it.
I may also lean back further and extend my distance between me and the camera when I wanna show fear or skepticism about a point I’m making.
Push and pull — That’s the psychology of human behaviour. It works.
Looking back over the last 15 months, delivering Zoom trainings at a rate of almost every other week, ranging from audiences of hundreds of people to small classes of 10–15 folks… both standing and seated… both short sessions of 1–2 hours and full day seminars of 7–8 hours…
These strategies have made my life easier as a trainer.
As a speaker, our role is merely that of a facilitator. To use the best strategy or tool at our disposal to make sure the message gets into the audience’s hearts and minds.
Zoom has some of the best features out there that makes this easy to execute. Try it.
While I miss soaking in the energy of a live crowd, online meetings can be fun too (for both the audience and the presenter).
Zoom has changed my life (And my wardrobe).
Thanks for reading. If you have any questions do message me on Twitter over here. I share weekly insights on Business, Investing, and Personal Development there.
