Virtual events have been growing for years, offering online experiences that feel as engaging as in-person ones. Instead of physical gatherings, virtual events let people connect in real time from home. Their popularity surged during the pandemic, especially with live streaming.

Webinars, virtual conferences, and social events bring global audiences together, removing geographic barriers and expanding reach. This guide will show you how to create a virtual events platform to reach global audiences at scale.

Virtual event platform definition

A virtual event platform is a comprehensive software solution designed to host, manage, and facilitate online (digital) events, such as webinars, conferences, trade shows, and networking sessions. It provides tools for real-time communication, interaction, and engagement between attendees, speakers, and organizers through video, audio, and chat functionalities.

The benefits of customizing the experience with a virtual events platform

A virtual event platform hosts and manages various online events like keynotes, concerts, and virtual trade shows. You can provide attendees, speakers, or event organizers with engagement tools—like real-time chat or polling—to help deliver an interactive event experience. Building a virtual event platform provides several benefits, whether you’re hosting a small or large online event.

Increase audience engagement with a platform for virtual events

A virtual event platform offers customizable options to fit your event needs. To boost attendee engagement, you can add user-friendly features like video and group chat for virtual meetups.

To build off of that, you can also provide:

• activities like surveys

• interactive networking sessions

• or workshops for attendees to provide feedback

This allows your audience to choose how they want to participate throughout your virtual event.

Virtual events platforms power accessibility

Creating a Virtual Space that mimics the feeling of in-person events allows your audience to network and build relationships with each other from anywhere in the world, without requiring travel. When you host your event online, this not only opens the door for global attendees to join your event, but as the event host, this also provides the flexibility to choose how you want to structure your event. Do you want to include virtual booths? Will you offer pre-recorded content? The choice is yours! 

Collect valuable online event data

Another advantage of building a virtual event platform is capturing real-time event data like detailed revenue reports and insight from your audience, attendee behavior, and demographics. Event organizers can then use the data collected for marketing and lead generation after the event. 

Virtual event platforms can help you reduce costs

Virtual events are typically less expensive than hosting an event in a physical location. By building a virtual event platform, event hosts can save money on staff, venue, setup time, and travel. This allows you to put more time and resources into event marketing or entertainment for your virtual event. 

Virtual event platform features

Some of the best virtual event platforms include customizable functionalities. From focusing on audience engagement to event management tools, building a platform for your use case that has the features you need from the start is essential. 

Below, we’ll dive into the core features that your virtual event platform should have in order to help you seamlessly host an online experience. 

1. Customizable and interactive event features

Audience engagement is one of the most important aspects to consider when hosting a virtual event. Engaging features that replicate the feeling of in-person interaction allow attendees to have an authentic virtual experience. Can your audience start a group chat? Are they able to hop on video conferencing with others? Does your platform support push notifications so you can communicate directly with your attendees? 

You can build engaging experiences with our pre-built Chat Components that let you fully customize your in-app chat the way you want for your virtual event. Creating a virtual event platform where you can completely customize the event experience is key in providing a memorable experience for your attendees. 

2. Online event registration

Attendees who are interested in your online event need a way to learn about your event and register. An event website or landing page with registration information allows you to showcase your event agenda and why you think this event would be beneficial to attend. The event registration page is also a great place to include custom branding. 

3. Virtual event marketing automation tools

In order to better streamline event marketing tasks, as well as functionality on the backend, automation is a central feature. Automation tools can be used throughout each stage of the event planning process. From your CRM, to email marketing, to real-time updates built into your virtual events platform, automating helps make planning an event easier. Plus, on the backend it helps save on developer time and costs since these features are built in from the start. 

4. Live event support

Having access to a support team during your virtual event gives you the ability to monitor attendee activity and requests as they occur, which is essential when hosting a live event. Platforms—like PubNub—offer a dedicated Event Support Team alongside operational dashboards so your app can operate reliably and in real time, guaranteeing that your event runs smoothly. And if you’re looking to add an extra layer of support, enabling a profanity filter in your chat gives you full control over the event experience, allowing you to focus on building engaging experiences instead of worrying about the backend infrastructure. 

5. Real-time event metrics

Being able to identify data in real time is crucial for detecting unexpected issues during a virtual event, especially when dealing with concurrent users. Fortunately, our Datadog dashboards offer a solution to this by providing instant notifications and real-time visibility for you to actively monitor app usage. This gives you the necessary tools to respond immediately to any drawbacks during your online event.  

Deploying these features are fundamental in delivering an engaging event to your audience. But, how do you determine what type of event is best for your use case? Below, we’ll walk you through some of the most popular virtual event experiences you can build. 

How virtual events platforms power different types of experiences

From webinars, to concert live streams, to hybrid events, there are various types of online events that enable you to create an exciting experience for your audience. So, how do you choose which event works best for your use case? Let’s evaluate some of the well-known types of virtual experiences. 

Webinars

A webinar is a popular live event that takes place online. Often hosted on Zoom or other video conferencing platforms, they can be in the form of a thought leadership presentation, live demo, or workshop. Webinars are generally interactive, including real-time features such as quizzes or breakout sessions that help foster a dialogue between participants and the host. Webinars provide a great way to share content and engage with your audience. 

Social events

Social experiences bring remote audiences together through a live stream. These virtual events tend to be a less formal occasion like a concert or sporting event. A fun way that you can encourage engagement in your event app is to use gamification to introduce interactive contests, polling, and leaderboards to create some friendly competition among attendees throughout the event. 

When building, something you’ll also want to take into consideration is concurrency.

With our solution, LiveLike, an engagement platform for interactive fan-driven experiences, is able to scale their platform in real time, with audience chats of any size. By making sure that your virtual events platform can handle audience spikes or fluctuations, without affecting latency, this helps ensure that your virtual event feels just as engaging as an in-person event. 

Trade shows and conferences

A virtual trade show or expo uses video conferencing to bring together members and exhibitors from the same industry where they can showcase their latest products and services. Shifting away from a physical event, trade shows have been able to broaden their consumer reach, opening up an array of networking opportunities for exhibitors. 

Virtual conferences are similar to webinars in that they can have a variety of different formats, some of which include seminars, workshops, roundtable discussions, or keynote presentations. They tend to be more formal than webinars, with an event agenda and interactive activities spread out over the course of a day or several days. The content included is often a mix of live streamed and pre-recorded content, giving your audience the option to choose what they feel is most beneficial to them.

With PubNub, vFairs, a virtual events platform, is able to capture the networking aspect of an in-person trade show or conference and transform it into a real time interactive remote experience. Reliability also plays a prominent role in virtual trade shows and conferences. Being able to easily scale takes the worry off of your backend services and allows you to focus on delivering your core product to your audience. So making sure that your platform is operating reliability and in real time is crucial. 

Hybrid events

Hybrid events combine virtual and in-person experiences, allowing participants to attend physically or online. They offer flexibility, letting attendees customize their experience and maximizing audience reach. When building your event, consider time to market—whether to build from scratch or use a customizable pre-built solution. A tailored platform lets you focus on your audience rather than infrastructure.

Create an engaging, real-time virtual events platform with PubNub

When it comes to choosing the right tools where you can build your virtual event platform, PubNub can help keep your audience engaged by adding interactive features alongside your app that will keep your attendees invested in the virtual event experience. 

With our platform, you can build in-app chat that easily scales, so you won’t have to worry about reaching an attendee limit for your event. Private, group, and broadcaster chats powered by PubNub allow audiences to choose how they want to interact with other attendees–with broadcasters having the ability to chat directly with the entire audience. Beyond that, real-time reactions and leaderboards capture the excitement of an audience, which help make conversations feel more authentic. And, if you’re looking for reliable support during your live event, you have access to our Event Support Team and real-time Datadog dashboards to help monitor and manage any requests. 

To recap, a virtual events platform allows you to host engaging experiences that can be viewed from anywhere in the world. By building customizable features into your virtual or hybrid event app, it helps keep your audience truly engaged on your app by providing interactive features that replicate the feeling of an in-person event. 

If you’re ready to create a fully-featured virtual event experience, get in touch with one of our experts. We’ll get you up and running with customizable features for your next virtual event.