According to a recent survey, 41.8% of Americans are still working remotely, and more than half plan to continue doing so in a post-COVID-19 world. Working from home has inevitably led to presentations taking place remotely which has the double-edged sword of everyone now being the tech person. You have to figure out how to use a video conferencing service and how you’re going to get everyone to see your Google Slides without showing them your Beyonce wallpaper.
It’s 2021, you better believe it’s time to make remote work-life easier. To do so, efforts must focus on the best practices to streamline and improve your online presentations. The good news is, over 60% of executives expect to raise spending on virtual collaboration tools in the near future.
First things first, you will need to download and install a video conferencing tool, such as XSplit Presenter, where I am the Chief Executive Officer, Loom or Mmhmm. These tools allow you to easily share presentations through Google Slides, Powerpoint, and PDFs.
Basic Online Presentation Features
Loom has a variety of packages, each consisting of different features. Features include screen recording, screenshots, engagement insights, and video drawing tools. Mmhmm connects with web applications such as Slack, Zoom, and Google. Mmhmm makes it easy for presentations to be customized with effects, backgrounds, and animations.
With a camera, slides can be a full screen of you alone or just a simple element. An entire screen can be useful if you’d like to introduce yourself but a simple element works best if demonstrating during presentation talking points. For example, if you’re a budding entrepreneur who is pitching a physical product, you can easily give a live demo without awkward transitions between desktop and camera sources.
Seamless Online Presentations
Easily add in a website as a slide, you can then interact with the screen as you normally would. This can be useful if you want to show analytics during your presentation or if you want to find a YouTube video to demonstrate based on the conversation. Even answer live questions that are asked and integrate them into the presentation with ease!
Speaking of taking questions, you may need to highlight or clarify some items in your presentation or show where certain features are in a product or website you may be presenting. Thankfully, visual communication tools in XSplit Present and Mmhmm have built-in whiteboards to draw directly onto any of your slides. You can easily highlight sections or add arrows for emphasis.
Even when (or if) you do return to the office, these tools can still make your life easier. Projector Mode enables you to easily project your presentation to a larger screen, and keep the controls on your personal screen without showing your desktop. You can easily integrate websites, video files and more using XSplit Presenter.
All of this goes a long way to not only make giving your online presentations easy and more professional, but they even make your offline presentations simpler, slicker, and most importantly easier to communicate. After all, isn’t that the point of presentations? With remote work here to stay, or being more prevalent than ever before, now is the time to improve your online presentations. Don’t let technology get in the way of expressing your ideas!
