Webinar Wire

How Long Should It Be?

Posted by Ken Molay November 15 2007 11:02 AM EDT

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Today I am giving a public web seminar on how to make your webinars more effective. And I know that one of the questions from the audience will be: "Is there a recommended duration for a webinar?" It always seems to come up.

Most sales/marketing web events these days are scheduled to last 60 minutes. People have become used to blocking out that amount of time for attending an online seminar. It works just fine. But if you advertise a one hour event, you owe it to your audience to end on time. They have other calls, meetings, and appointments scheduled. Drifting over your time limit is disrespectful of their priorities.

You can tell yourself that while some of your audience will leave, the really interested ones will stay. The problem with this is that you engender ill will among the people who have to leave. They feel they are missing something. Probably something a lot more interesting than the ten minutes you spent up front on general introductions and overviews. After all, you are extending the session because you have a lot of interesting interaction going on or important information left to relate.

Use rehearsals to help judge your presentation time. Very few speakers are experienced enough to guess how long it will take them to go through their slides. While many of us speed up our speech patterns from a combination of nervousness and adrenaline during a live event, we overcompensate by adding more "filler" and extended explanations.

A few companies have begun advertising their events as lasting 45 minutes instead of one hour. This has two potential benefits. People may feel that they have enough time to attend and still prepare for a phone call or meeting immediately following, on the hour. And if you DO find yourself slipping over your allotted time by a few minutes, people are more likely to have those extra few minutes available without being forced to log off.

If you are giving a training session rather than a marketing/communications message, you can probably get away with a 90 minute duration. Much longer than that and your desk-bound audience will get very itchy for a change of pace. They need to stretch, get coffee, go to the bathroom, or just get away from the drone of your voice!

From time to time I get inquiries from business people who want to turn their live in-room seminars into web-based sessions. "We meet for six hours in a hotel conference room. There is a lot of information to cover, but at the end of the day everybody gets their money's worth. How about if I just webcast my live session?"

Fuggedaboutit. Nobody will sit in front of a PC for hours on end watching a marathon training session. Create a separate web-based version of your training and break it into a series of smaller chunks, offered across a few days or even weeks.

Most of us record our live webinars and make them available for on-demand viewing after the fact. The problem with this is that while a live, interactive event will hold people for 60 minutes, a passive video will not. We have been culturally conditioned by music videos, advertisements, and YouTube submissions to expect a quick, entertaining, and easily understood message delivered in a few minutes. For maximum effectiveness, a recorded webcast should be no more than 15 minutes long. Ten minutes is better. Five minutes is optimal.

How is that possible? Again, by doing the extra work to create content that is specific to the communications medium rather than taking the quick and easy way out of reusing what you already have. Pick out your key messages from the longer version. Get rid of all the introductory information. Make the content pop... quickly and clearly. Deliver your message and stop. You may need to make several shorter recordings to cover everything you present in a single longer live event.

To summarize:

• Training webinars: 90 minutes maximum
• Sales/marketing webinars: 60 minutes maximum
• Recorded on-demand webcasts: 15 minutes maximum

On all three, shorter is better. Edit down your material, present it quickly and clearly, and let people get on with their day.