Even though Zoom Meetings and Zoom Webinars offer similar features, there are a few distinctions to be aware of when determining which tool best suits your needs.
Zoom Meetings are perfect for holding more interactive sessions where you want to encourage active audience participation or divide your session into smaller groups. Zoom Webinars can be compared to a virtual classroom or auditorium. For events with large crowds or open to the public, webinars are perfect. Usually, participants in webinars don’t talk to each other.
Based on the experience you want to deliver to your participants, using Zoom meetings or webinars should also be taken into consideration. Here is the information you need to know about each choice.
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What Are Zoom Meetings and Zoom Webinars?
Perhaps Zoom’s most well-known product is Zoom Meetings. You can converse with coworkers, friends, and even family members in a meeting setting. Zoom claims that Meetings is created for group collaboration, team discussions, sales demos, online learning, and workplace debates.
With Meetings, you get a collaborative environment where everyone can screen share, interact with video and audio, and “engage” in a virtual discussion. Answer poll questions, use virtual backgrounds, and interact with others via chat and screen sharing along with video.
Zoom Webinars, on the other hand, are comparable to virtual events. With webinars, you can present ideas and content to a larger audience in a digital setting. The ability of audience members to participate, including whether they can share video and audio, is entirely under the control of the host (and occasionally a few co-hosts). Participants can either be silent viewers of the webinar or they can chat and share files.
Read More: Is Zoom HIPPA Compliant 2022?
Zoom Webinar Vs Meeting: What Are the Similarities?
Zoom Meetings and Zoom Webinars share more characteristics as remote events than they do differences. They are both intended for online conferences and meetings, to begin with.
Apart from this, some main features such as screen sharing, audio and video chats, transferring of files, whiteboards (i.e. you can literally write and use annotations on this whiteboard to clearly define your message – just like a traditional classroom), polls and surveys, registrations for attendees to join the seminar on either meetings or webinar, closed captioning, meeting recordings to watch later, and require passwords to join as an additional layer of security for people to join.
But it’s important to keep in mind that Zoom Meetings and Zoom Webinars operate in different ways with regard to these features. They are frequently only meant to be used by the host of a webinar; however, in meetings, they can be made available to anyone and are more participatory.
Zoom Webinar Vs Meeting: What’s the Difference?
For teams of up to ten people, Zoom Meeting is the best option because it is typically used to host interactive sessions in small teams rather than webinars. It’s perfect for management meetings, educational groups, general employees, and corporate sessions in addition to client and sales meetings.
Each participant in a Zoom meeting can control their own audio, and audio sharing is easily accessible. Members can be unmuted or made audible by the host. They can mute everyone as soon as they arrive. Any attendee may share their video, and this is unimportant in webinars. Video sharing has its own set of rules. The meetings also include a waiting area and a breakout space.
But things are a little different when it comes to webinars.
You may already be aware of the main objective, which is to engage a large audience and conduct online courses or remote events in which the entire class can take part.
Zoom meetings are unfortunately not ideal for this type of activity. On the other hand, web conferences can be used for small business conferences or meetings between the CEO and specific employees. As a result, it functions well for both formal and informal conferences.
Therefore, large-scale events and open broadcasting with more than 50 participants, such as town meetings, monthly reports, and academic lectures, are best suited for using webinars. They are frequently employed in a variety of fields, including politics, the educational sector, and as event hosts.
You can use audio sharing with it; the presenter and panelists can control their own audio-only settings, guests join in listen-only mode for the majority of the session, and the host is the only one with the authority to unmute participants. Numerous benefits come with sharing videos.
For instance, presenters and panelists have more control over the conference as a whole because they can only share their videos through webinars.
The last outstanding feature is Paypal integration. Participants will be sent to PayPal to confirm their payments after signing up for your webinar. Once the payments are made, they will receive instructions on how to access the webinar.
When to Use Zoom Meetings
Teams, students, and other groups can share content, communicate via audio and video, and participate in a collaborative conversation in Zoom Meetings. To make the experience as immersive as possible, Zoom Meetings includes tools. For instance, you can use virtual backgrounds in your meetings or host Immersive meetings to bring everyone together in a single shared virtual environment. Zoom Meetings also offer:
- Waiting rooms to ensure only the right people can join
- Breakout rooms for deeper conversations between smaller groups of attendees
- Registration and meeting passwords to better protect your discussions
- Screen and file sharing for both the host and permitted users
- Whiteboarding is a digital environment where participants can write, draw, and annotate together.
- Chat and discussion through Zoom Chat (this can include sharing emojis and links)
- Reactions: Meeting participants can silently react by using an emoji in a meeting
- Polling to collect information from groups of participants
- Streaming via YouTube Live, Facebook Live, and other custom services
- View management to spotlight a speaker or multiple participants
- Integrations: Users can integrate Zoom Meetings with various tools, including calendar services, Salesforce, and more
When workers need to interact in a setting where everyone has the chance to speak freely, Zoom Meetings work best. Meetings typically have multiple people interacting at once, despite the fact that hosts can muffle other participants and choose who can share video.
You can present ideas during a Zoom Meeting with a co-host or by yourself, share your screen (or just a portion of it), involve attendees through polls and chat, and even separate your staff into breakout rooms so they can discuss ideas.
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When to Use Zoom Webinars
Where Zoom Meetings are designed to support multiple people interacting at once, Zoom Webinars are more about “presenting” content to a specific audience. Many businesses and academic institutions use these webinars for sizable training sessions, lectures, or classes that don’t need constant participation from other students. Announcements can be made using Zoom webinars as well.
In order to connect with audiences around the world, webinars can be added as a feature to the paid Zoom Meeting license. Similar to Zoom Meetings, webinars include a number of fantastic features, such as registration with distinctive pages where people can sign up for your webinar. Various native and outside tools can also be used to stream your webinar.
Some of the extra features available from Zoom Webinars include:
- Using source tracking URLs, you can see where webinar participants are coming from (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Email, YouTube, a landing page)
- Q&A: This goes beyond simple polls by enabling webinar participants to submit questions and receive answers at the host’s pace. Admins can also enable attendees to answer the questions of their colleagues
- Integrations: You can connect your Zoom webinars to EventBrite and PayPal, ideal if you’re planning on charging for online classes or creating digital tickets for events
- Webinar surveys: You can set up a survey to appear after an event to collect information about your users
- Attendee view management: Webinars come with a three-screen view, so you can watch an active speaker, presentation, and the audience at the same time
- Reporting: Zoom webinars come with reporting features to help you track user engagement and keep an eye on when people begin to lose interest in your content
The less personal Zoom Webinars are designed for announcements, lessons, and even some types of online events. Webinars give you the chance to communicate with many people at once. Even better, you can interact with your attendees more easily in the Zoom Webinars environment by using tools like surveys and Q&A.
Final Words: Choosing Zoom Meetings Vs Zoom Webinars
Given the various Zoom alternatives in the market, after reading this article, you should have a good understanding of the differences between webinars and Zoom conferences. Webinars are powerful marketing tools that help businesses grow and achieve new milestones.
Zoom Meetings and Zoom Webinars are effective tools for communication and collaboration in the future. Each of these Zoom services, however, serves a distinct objective.
For more interactive sessions where you want to encourage audience participation, a Zoom Meeting is the best option. They work best in sessions where you want to encourage active participation and speaking from the floor.
On the other hand, Zoom Webinars let you share content with many viewers at once while requiring less participation from your audience. Webinars might be the best option if you want to present to a large audience at once or host a class.
When planning your strategy, take into account all of your options and don’t ignore the advantages of webinars.
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FAQs
What is the Benefit of Zoom Webinar?
With Zoom Webinars, you can share content, including video, audio, and images, with large audiences and increase engagement. You can plan and deliver professional webinars at a low cost thanks to the user-friendly interface.
Can People See You on Zoom Webinar?
In a Webinar, participants are not visible or audible; you should be able to see and hear the presenters when you participate. Both you and the other attendees won’t be able to see or hear each other.
Can I Use Zoom Webinar for Free?
Zoom Offers Free Video Conferencing. Use your laptop, smartphone, tablet, or smart display to host a safe, cost-free video conference call. Zoom’s clear HD video and audio, as well as its robust collaboration tools like screen sharing and annotation, make it simple to start or join a secure video call.