How to Captivate Your Audience with Your Body Language
When you’re on a video conference with your colleagues or employees, you need to work doubly hard to captivate your audience, as the meeting participants can easily get distracted during the video call. If you’re unsure how to keep your meeting attendees’ attention, check out this quick and easy guide for captivating your audience with your body language.
Maintain Eye Contact with the Camera
Maintaining eye contact with the camera and, in turn, your meeting participants will ensure that you build empathy, according to Tweak Your Biz. Eye contact is a great way to establish your presence, maintain a human connection with your colleagues and employees, relay a sense of authenticity and acknowledge to the other attendees that you are paying attention and focused on the task at hand. Make sure that when you are smiling, you include your eyes in the smile to appear as genuine as possible.
Speak with Your Whole Body
Make sure that the meeting attendees are able to see your hands. Speaking with your hands and your whole body helps you use conviction in your presentation. In addition to using your hands, ensure that you are using all the muscles in your face. However, it is important to remember that too much pre-rehearsed body language could come off as inauthentic and too much gesturing or speaking with your hands can actually be distracting. Use the right amount of gesturing to draw empathy from your audience.
Keep It Light
Keep your topics light and use variety and humor to keep the meeting participants interested. If you speak in a monotone or talk only about one subject, your audience will get bored. Draw some humor into your presentation to keep your meeting participants’ attention.
Practice Makes Perfect
While over-practicing your body language can make for a bad presentation, it is crucial that you practice the presentation itself as much as possible, so that you know your stuff inside out. Rehearsing ahead of time allows you to concentrate on connecting with and reacting to your audience during the actual presentation. Practicing also ensures that you don’t have to simply read off the slides. When you know the material by heart, you can engage with your audience better.
Rehearsing allows you to concentrate on connecting with your audience.Click To Tweet
Improvise and Respond to Your Audience
Be prepared to respond to your meeting participants in real time as needed. Pay attention to body language and cues from your audience that indicate whether they are interested in a particular subject. If they are more interested in one topic than another, focus on that topic for awhile. Also, make sure to listen to your attendees’ questions and use them to guide where you take the rest of the presentation. It’s okay to pause for questions halfway through, as this allows you to develop empathy with your meeting attendees. Interactive webcasting is the perfect way to engage with your audience. If you’re looking for a video conferencing service that will allow you to interact with the participants, BlueJeans is a great way to go.
Deal with Objects
According to Genard Method, stage actors use props to help connect with their audience. However, they make sure to handle the props the way their character would. Keep that in mind when using objects during a presentation. Whether you are using a remote clicker or a handout, you want to handle the object in a way that furthers your message and your role in the company. Use the object to get your message across to the meeting participants and make sure that your meeting attendees see a certain level of genuine energy in your body language and handling of these objects.
Know Your Audience
The best way to truly engage with your participants is to know them. Research the people you are presenting to ahead of time, especially if you are selling a particular product or service. Knowing your audience’s needs and wants ahead of time will change the type of language you use, as well as the body language and mannerisms you use for optimal impact.
Just Be Yourself
While these tips are important, remember to just be yourself. Being genuine is the best way to draw empathy from the people you’re speaking to and it will keep them from getting distracted. No one wants to listen to someone who acts like a know-it-all or drones on about the same topic and no one wants to feel talked down to, so keep that in mind.
Now you’re ready to connect with your audience via video conference! Whether you are speaking to a small number of colleagues or hosting a large video conference event with your customers, clients and partners, you have the tools you need to keep the participants engaged and empathetic. Happy conferencing!
