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Determining How Long to Leave Virtual Summit Videos Up

You’ve hosted a virtual summit, and the videos are live for your attendees to engage with and see now it’s time to decide how long to leave virtual summit videos up? Naturally this is something you want to figure out, particularly because you don’t want to upset your audience, especially if they paid for access to your virtual event and have a set expectation as to how long they’ll be able to access the content they paid for.

But is there a “best practice” or “ideal timeframe” to keep your virtual summit videos available for those who were part of your event to review? This is a key question that stands to be answered if you want to keep your audience satisfied! At Beverly Boy Productions, we’ve got more than two decades of experience in producing event videos with a strong background in virtual event summits and virtual productions. We’re here to assist in answering this frequently asked question, “How long should I leave my virtual summit videos up?”

Best Practices with Virtual Summit On-Demand Video Content

One of the questions that our clients frequently ask when it comes to on-demand video content related to their event is, “are there any best practices or is there an ideal amount of time to leave videos up for viewers?” This really depends largely on the industry, audience, and your own specifications. Determining how long to leave virtual summit event videos up is really something that is going to vary based on a number of factors as there really are no “best practices,” in this regard.

As a general rule of thumb, most event hosts will make on-demand video content available for a period of at least 30 days post-event. However, some conferences and summits will make video content on-demand available for an unlimited time if they have server space to allow for and/or accommodate this. This is often the case when event videos are hosted on other platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo or various other video hosts where the actual server space allocations are not as important to the provider.

Factors to Consider in Determining How Long to Leave Virtual Summit Event Videos Up

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If you’re having trouble determining how long to leave virtual summit event videos up, sometimes it’s best to start with reviewing other events in your industry to see what your competitors are doing in regards to on-demand video access. If you see that there are several other virtual events or conferences in your industry that have provided on-demand access to event videos for a period of 6 months on average, than it would make sense to assume that your target market is going to have an expectation that they will have access to the event for a similar timeframe. Thus, you would want to make your on-demand videos available for 6 months so that your audience is satisfied.

Likewise, if you’re dealing with a situation where your industry doesn’t really have a lot of competition in terms of past virtual summits or events, you’re going to have a bit more flexibility in regards to how long you can keep your videos up. In this case, you might resort to the overall rule of thumb in which most virtual event videos are available on-demand for a period of at least 30 days after the event. This is common across may industries and it really just means that you can make your videos available for 30 days, or more, depending on your own desires.

Another option you have is to ask your audience ahead of time what they want. You could do this through a poll or similar questionnaire in which you gather audience opinions and make a decision based on your target market. Keep in mind that you won’t please everyone, but if you can please the majority you’ll be in a good place!

Creating Urgency with Your Videos

Some brands choose to create urgency to maximize video engagement among virtual summit attendees in a short period of time. For instance, BeachBody makes virtual summit videos available to attendees for a period of just 24 hours after the event to encourage anyone who may have missed a keynote presentation or other portion of the event to engage quickly before the content is gone for good!

This strategy, of creating a sense of urgency with your on-demand content can work out particularly well in terms of generating immediate engagement and potential revenues from the event content but it can also be upsetting to some fans, particularly in industries such as the medical industry and some technology fields where the content is very technical in nature and difficult to consume in large quantities and short time periods. As a general rule, you’ll want to carefully consider placing very short timeframes on your content when determining how long to leave virtual summit event videos up. Urgency is good, but you don’t want to pass the line at which you create an upset audience!

How Long Are Virtual Summit Videos Available to View?

We checked some of the most popular virtual summits over the past two years to determine how long virtual summit videos are generally left up for their audience to view on-demand. Here’s what we found:

As you can see, the timeframes vary greatly in regards to industry and event. When determining how long to leave virtual summit event videos up, it’s very important to consider your own audience’s expectations and what will work out best for your event.

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