I’m going to unpack what’s the difference between a zoom meeting and a zoom webinar. In case you just like teleported past 2020 when we were all working from home and got real comfortable with zoom, and you still need a little clarity on zoom webinar versus meeting, this video is for you. I’m gonna do it in a really concise format. I’m gonna unpack the differences in 3 core elements. You can go to zoom’s website, and see feature lists and all these differences.
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Unpacking 3 Perspectives
From the perspective of the audience, from the perspective of the purpose, and the perspective of engagement, or the way that you can engage with your audience around that purpose. By the end of this video, what is in my brain will be in your brain and you’ll hopefully be more clear and a tad bit more sophisticated when it comes to zoom.
Audience
In a zoom meeting, your audience is going to be less than 500 people guaranteed because zoom limits, zoom meetings to 500 people. If you’re going to be doing any event that’s going to have a huge number of people, more than 500, you’re automatically gonna be doing a webinar or something else. That matters a lot. Zoom meetings are by far the most common way that people meet in just small team meetings, 5, 6 people etc. It allows for video to be on, it allows you to see participants really easily. It still has the features of chat and all that but, video is really the biggest difference there with audience. You can actually see participants, you can be in gallery view which is that lovely traditional brady, bunchy, gridded view; and the other thing is you can interact with them differently. You can interact with your audience differently because you can ask them to- on a scale of 1 to 10, hold up the number of fingers that best represents how this meeting is going for them. 10 being the best, 1 being crap, right. You can see that really visually, so there’s quick like earth scale that engagement is really nice. As opposed to a webinar, you’re not seeing anybody’s video and so as the presenter, you are just speaking into the black hole, right. You’re just like speaking into the void in that moment. That is the main difference there in terms of audience with zoom webinar and meeting.
Purpose
The purpose of a webinar meeting- a zoom meeting, the purpose is going to be experience, and conversation, and discussion, and participation. A zoom webinar, typically, the purpose is content delivery. I want to unplug the USB drive from my brain and plug it into your brain. The idea of like, “I want to share information with you.” Maybe I would say that 95 percentish. 95 percent of people who lead webinars just literally give content. They just sage on the stage, speak it out. I’m not a huge fan of that. I think if you’ve got 100 or 1,000 people on a webinar, that you should use the ability in zoom webinars to use the chat feature to do some idea harvesting. Get other people’s perspectives, allow them to introduce themselves, ask for engagement participation through there. Yet usually, the purpose of a webinar is content delivery, not deep engagement.
Engagement
This third element, engagement, I’ve kind of hit on it with both the audience and the purpose element. But, the way that you can engage people in a zoom meeting, in my opinion, is way better. Anytime you can opt for a zoom meeting, I would say do it. Now, a couple caveats with engagement, you can do breakouts in a zoom meeting but not in a webinar. If you’re gonna do breakouts, at the time of recording this anyway, zoom was still trying to kind of get their stuff together and I found that when I was leading a keynote or workshop with 300 to 500 people on zoom, when I did breakouts, the max amount of 50 breakout rooms, zoom would like just start crying and break down. Instead of breakouts, we just broke down and nothing actually worked. It kind of just glitched out and so, for me, I would- my loose meeting cap is 250 people per zoom call because that allows you to do 40 breakout rooms and not have too many people in each breakout room because you don’t want too many cooks in the kitchen. You don’t want like 12 people in a breakout room because that’s not- just too many people, Ideally between 4 and 7 people in every breakout. In a webinar, just forget about it. There is no breakout room, there’s none of that happening. You’re only interacting with people through the chat, or you can choose to upgrade attendees to panelists.You can make an attendee of panelists and see their video, see their audio, yeah, hear their audio. See their audio? Hear their audio in that respect as well. That’s kind of cool because you can create a little bit of a panel or a fishbowl dynamic where you could promote 12 attendees to panelists, or 6 attendees to panelists and have a discussion with that group while everybody else watches that discussion take place. That’s kind of a cool way you can create engagement as well in a webinar format.