How to Connect with Your Audience
Emcee Singapore: Every speaker wants a good ‘connection’ with the audience. In some cases, that can be quite hard. Not all audiences are the same. Some audiences you have to ‘convince’. Wouldn’t it be great if your audience listens to every word you had to say? It’s definitely possible.
There are a many ways to connect with your audience. Your audience will feel closer to you without you being too obvious about it.
1) Respond to what you see
Many speakers focus too much on themselves when they are on stage. Most of the time this is not intentional. Speakers want to do a good job, so they focus on the job they feel is most important: the words and the slides.
If you focus only there, you will lose the attention of the audience because there is no connection.
A good emcee has to know what happens in the room at all times. Are people paying attention, are they bored, are they engaged? Who is laughing and who isn’t? And who seems to agree or disagree with you?
The mere fact that you are responding to their movements shows you care and caring means connecting.
2) Look at people a bit longer
It’s common advice for emcee Singapore emcees: “Look to all parts of the room and focus on some people”. Great advice, but you need to be careful with this. If you ‘glance’ over the audience too much, they will feel neglected. They feel you don’t ‘see’ them.
What you want is a real connection. This means looking people in the eye during the event or whenever you are on stage. In fact, look at some people a bit longer. Not too long as that could be creepy, but long enough to get a connection and get a smile even. It will bring you closer. Look at them, really connect with your audience.
3) Smile and have fun
Smiling is one of the most underestimated parts of public speaking. If you want to connect, the audience must feel you like them. If you are not smiling, how will they ever feel you like them?
Once you show you are enjoying yourself on stage, the audience will become part of that. And they will feel closer to you.
How to make people smile? Sometimes you can do that with jokes. Being funny does help. If you can make the audience smile, they will feel closer to you.
Now there is a danger here. If your joke backfires, you could lose all the connection. So think about jokes. Don’t offend people. Don’t make fun of specific groups. Be lighthearted and funny. The best person to joke about is you.
4) Refer to what they already know
If you talk about stuff that people can’t relate to, you make it hard for them. It can be almost like you are talking to them in a foreign language. How do you feel when you are part of a conversation between two people speaking a language you don’t understand? You feel left out.
You want to avoid people feeling left out. Even when you are talking about difficult topics. You want to sometimes bring it back to basics during your emcee Singapore emcee gig. The best way of doing that is to refer to things people already know. Sometimes that is an analogy, sometimes it’s going back to something everybody knows.
If you refer to what people know, you give them trust and they will get closer to you.
5) Compliment your audience
A great way to connect with your audience is to compliment them. Tell them how great they are.
There are several parts during your emcee engagement where you can do this. At the start, you can make a compliment about the location, the city that you are in or the company that you are presenting at. During the talk, you can tell them you can see they are a smart audience. “I don’t need to tell you this, you know this”, shows you feel they are smart. And at the end of the talk, you can say you enjoyed their presence.
A compliment can do many things!
H/T: Speakwithpersuasion
