5 Ways to Optimize Virtual Networking with Zoom Breakout Rooms
While virtual meetups cannot offer everything at in-person networking events can, Zoom breakout rooms can help them get pretty close. Since the onset of the pandemic, we at BLME have relied on the platform’s breakout room feature more times than we can count. These rooms allow virtual event hosts to facilitate a more intimate connection for their attendees, even for events with hundreds of people. Here, we are breaking down our 5 favorite ways to optimize virtual networking using Zoom breakout rooms.
5 Ways to Optimize Virtual Networking with Zoom Breakout Rooms
1. Mindfully group the rooms.
Randomizing breakout rooms can be useful for general networking, but for a more specialized approach, we recommend purposefully assigning the rooms. If you know multiple attendees of your event work in the same field and would benefit from knowing each other, make sure to put them in the same breakout room. Or, if you know there are certain groups of friends going to your event, make sure to put them all in separate rooms to help expand their horizons.
2. Shuffle the rooms around.
Sure, it is great to be able to network with 10 people at a virtual event. But, why not make that 30 people? This doesn’t mean you have to make your guests try to network with 30 people at once (a too-many-cooks type of situation) but instead, you can do multiple sessions of breakout rooms. After letting the groups mingle for the allotted amount of time, shift around attendees from room to room to shuffle up the groups. Thankfully, Zoom makes it easy to move people from room to room, even when breakout rooms have already started.
3. Monitor the time and update your attendees.
If you are following our advice above and doing multiple breakout room sessions with different people in each, you want to be mindful of the time. You wouldn’t want to have the first session last 20 minutes while the second one only lasts 5. To prevent this from happening, let your attendees know before going into the breakout rooms how long each session will be. When there is about 5 minutes left, you can broadcast a message to each attendee to let them know how much time remains. You can also broadcast a message 1-2 minutes before you switch rooms to let them know it’s time to wrap it up.
4. Give attendees conversation prompts.
We all know that networking events can be a little awkward and uncomfortable. A main culprit of this unwanted feeling is people not knowing what to talk about. To help ease your attendees into conversation within their breakout rooms, you can use the “broadcast message” feature we spoke about above to give prompts and questions for your guests to talk about. Every couple of minutes, send a new prompt. If conversation is flowing naturally, guests can just keep it going but if not, the prompts will save them from any awkward silence and help these breakout rooms be productive. An example of a prompt to send to your attendees would be “What type of connections am I looking to establish at this event?” or “3 words to describe my working style would be…”
5. Encourage your guests to utilize the chat.
The hope of these networking breakout rooms is to create and facilitate meaningful connections. Sometimes, there will just be so much more to talk about than what can be covered in the allotted time. Invite and encourage your guests to use the chat feature to put their contact information so others can connect with them and continue these conversations past the end of the event. Attendees can either send their information to everyone on the general chat or if there are certain people they feel they really connected to and want to continue talking to, they can send those guests a private message.
Zoom has been an incredible tool for us event professionals throughout this unprecedented time. We are so grateful for the awesome feature that is Zoom’s breakout rooms. These rooms make virtual networking not only possible, but effective.