Webinar Wire

Recommended Webinar Length

Posted by Ken Molay December 23 2008 9:15 AM EDT

3 comments

I'm continuing responses to Webinar FAQs with a look at "How long should a webinar be?"

The most common length for a public webinar is 60 minutes. It's easy to block out on a calendar and it "just seems natural." But there's nothing magical about 60 minutes. One of my favorite tricks is to schedule a webinar for 45 minutes (as suggested by Cece Salomon-Lee in her comment to the original post). This gives attendees time before their next meeting to prep, get coffee, go to the bathroom, or whatever. And in a case where your Q&A is going long because of great interest, people are often more willing to stay with you up to the next hour division.

By the way, people do NOT feel shortchanged if you give them some short, directed information in a 20 or 30 minute block. You might try doing a series of these shorter events. It can keep people coming back to your site and gives your audience a chance to spread the word to their colleagues to attend subsequent sessions (after they see what a great job you do). Shorter, targeted deliveries also work much better as recorded archives.

My usual advice about recorded presentations is to keep them at 10 minutes or less if you can possibly manage it. People do not maintain concentration for as long when watching a recording. Offering a set of short, subdivided chunks can be more effective than one long presentation. But this takes more work, thus making it extremely uncommon.

Online training classes often go longer than marketing or informational webinars. I'd still recommend a cap of no more than 90 minutes maximum. You'll have a hard time keeping "butts in seats" longer than that at a single stretch. Again, if you have more material to cover, break it into multiple sessions. And even on a 90 minute event, take a break in the middle to let people stretch.

If your web conferencing software lets you show your computer screen, you can set up a countdown timer on breaks to let people know when you'll be starting again. I love this free timer called Egg. It's highly customizable and easy to use.

Tomorrow we'll have another answer in the FAQ series.