Virtual Presenting Is Here to Stay, But Most People Still Get It Wrong
Years on from the widespread shift to remote and hybrid working, virtual presentations have become a permanent part of professional life. Team meetings, client pitches, project updates, training sessions and leadership briefings now routinely take place through a screen.
Yet despite all that practice, many of the same mistakes continue to appear. Cameras are positioned too low. Speakers look at their notes instead of the lens. Backgrounds distract from the message. Slides dominate the screen. Delivery becomes flatter, faster and noticeably less engaging than it would be in person.
The reason is simple: presenting virtually is not exactly the same skill as presenting in a room.
Many people have never been shown how the two environments differ. Instead, they have transferred their usual presentation habits onto Microsoft Teams, Google Meet or Zoom, and hoped they would work just as well. Often, they do not.
In a physical room, your presence, movement and eye contact help to hold attention. Online, those signals are reduced or lost altogether. Your audience sees a small image of you, may be surrounded by distractions and can disengage without you noticing. This means details that might seem minor, such as where you look, how you frame yourself or how much energy you bring, can have a surprisingly disproportionate impact.
These small, fixable mistakes can quietly undermine your credibility, clarity and impact, even when your content is strong. The good news is that they are also among the easiest presentation problems to correct once you know what to look for.
In this blog we will explore some of the most common virtual presentation mistakes and the simple adjustments that can make the biggest difference to how confident, engaging and credible you come across on screen.
Looking at the Screen Instead of the Camera
If there is one virtual presentation habit that has the biggest impact on how you’re perceived, it’s this one.
When you’re presenting online, your natural instinct is to look at the people on your screen. After all, that’s how conversations work in everyday life. The problem is that when you focus on the faces in the meeting window, you’re usually looking slightly below or to the side of your camera. Although it feels like you’re making eye contact, your audience experiences something completely different.
To them, it looks as though you’re looking away.
Why you should look at the camera instead of the screen when presenting virtually? Because looking into the camera creates the impression of direct eye contact, helping you appear more confident, professional and engaging to your audience.
Eye contact is one of the strongest ways to build trust and connection with an audience. In a virtual presentation, the only way to recreate that feeling is by looking directly into the camera lens while you’re speaking. It gives the impression that you’re talking to each person individually, making your delivery feel more engaging and conversational.
This can feel surprisingly unnatural at first because, while you’re looking into the lens, you can’t easily see how your audience is reacting. Most presenters worry they’re missing visual cues or that they’re somehow speaking into empty space. Fortunately, this discomfort disappears quite quickly. With just a few sessions of deliberate practice, looking into the camera becomes much more natural.
You don’t have to stare into the lens throughout the entire presentation. It’s perfectly fine to glance at your audience, your notes or your slides. The key is to return your focus to the camera whenever you’re making an important point or speaking directly to your audience.
Another simple technique is to position the meeting window so the main speaker’s image sits directly beneath your camera, or as close to it as possible. This naturally brings your eyeline closer to the lens, making your eye contact appear much stronger without feeling forced.
Actionable tip: Place a small sticky note or arrow next to your camera as a visual reminder, and practise a short run-through where you deliberately speak to the lens rather than the screen. Recording yourself doing this will show you exactly how much of a difference it makes.
Poor Camera Position and Lighting
Your audience starts forming an impression of you within the first few seconds of joining a virtual presentation. It’s the same with face-to face presentations, but in a virtual meeting there are a lot fewer physical cues on display that help the audience to form an opinion, so it’s even more important to get the basics right. Before you’ve introduced yourself or shared your first slide, they have already noticed your camera position, lighting and overall setup.
One of the most common, and easiest to fix, mistakes is positioning your laptop camera below eye level. This creates an unflattering upward angle that can make you appear uncomfortable and ‘remote’. While your audience won’t consciously analyse why, the effect can subtly undermine your credibility before you’ve spoken a single word.
Ideally, your camera should sit at eye level, with the top of your head just below the top of the frame and the image cropped to just below your armpits. Raising your laptop on a stack of books or using a laptop stand is often all it takes to achieve a much more natural and professional viewpoint.
One technique I’ve found particularly useful when working from home is having simple visual markers behind my camera. In my office, the top and middle shelves of a bookcase happen to line up perfectly with the top and bottom of my video frame. Before every meeting, I can quickly position my laptop so those shelves sit in the same place on screen, knowing my camera is correctly framed every time.
Lighting is just as important as camera position. The main source of light should come from in front of you rather than behind you. A window behind your chair or a bright light in the background causes your camera to expose for the brighter scene, leaving your face in shadow and making it much harder for your audience to see your expressions. By contrast, a window facing you or a simple desk lamp positioned in front of you can dramatically improve how clear, professional and approachable you appear on screen.
These may seem like small technical adjustments, but they have a disproportionate impact on first impressions. We see this time and again in our workshops. Poor lighting and camera positioning can unintentionally change how a presenter is perceived. For less experienced presenters, it can make them appear hesitant or less confident than they really are. For senior leaders, it can diminish the authority and presence they would naturally project in a face-to-face setting.
Common mistake: Presenting with a window or bright light source directly behind you. It is one of the most frequent setup errors we see, and it immediately makes you harder to see and connect with, regardless of how strong your content is.
Flat, Low-Energy Delivery
One of the biggest surprises for people presenting virtually is how much their energy changes the moment they move from a room to a screen.
In a face-to-face presentation, your audience gives you constant feedback. You see people smiling, nodding, reacting to your ideas and making eye contact. That interaction naturally fuels your delivery. Online, many of those visual cues disappear. Cameras may be turned off, faces appear in tiny thumbnail images, or your audience may be focused on your slides rather than looking directly at you.
Without realising it, most presenters unconsciously reduce their energy. Their voice becomes flatter, their pace more even, and their facial expressions less animated. Because it feels perfectly normal while they’re speaking, they often have no idea that their delivery has become noticeably less engaging.
Your audience, however, experiences something different. For them the presentation feels less interesting and harder to stay focused on.
The solution isn’t to become louder or overly theatrical. Instead, aim to compensate for what the camera naturally takes away. Use slightly more vocal variety, slightly more facial expression and slightly more deliberate pacing than you would when presenting in person. What feels like a little too much to you will often appear completely natural to your audience.
Another simple technique is to stand rather than sit whenever possible. Standing improves your posture, breathing and vocal projection, making it much easier to speak with energy and enthusiasm. It also encourages more natural movement and expression, helping you communicate with greater impact throughout your presentation.
Actionable tip: Record a short section of your presentation and watch it back with the sound on. If your energy feels flat to you on playback, it will feel even flatter to a live audience. Don’t be afraid to dial up your vocal variety, facial expression and energy more than feels natural in the moment.
Overloaded, Text-Heavy Slides
Text-heavy slides make presentations harder to follow in any setting, but they become an even bigger problem when you’re presenting virtually.
When your slides fill the screen, your audience can no longer rely on your facial expressions, eye contact and body language to help them interpret your message. Instead, all of their attention is drawn to the slide itself. If that slide is packed with text, you’ve unintentionally given them two competing tasks: read and listen.
Human brains aren’t very good at doing both at the same time.
When people have to choose between reading a busy slide and listening to the presenter, they almost always read first. By the time they’ve worked through the text, they’ve often missed the explanation that gave it meaning. As a result, your key messages become less clear and your presentation feels more demanding than it needs to be.
A much more effective approach is to design each slide around a single key idea, supported by only the words or visuals needed to reinforce that message. This keeps your audience focused on what you’re saying rather than trying to absorb large amounts of on-screen text. In most cases, more slides with less content on each one will create a smoother and more engaging presentation.
It’s also worth remembering that your audience wants to see you, not just your slides. Periodically coming out of screen-share mode so your face fills the screen helps to re-establish connection, reminds people that a conversation is taking place and encourages greater attention and participation, particularly during longer presentations.
Quick slide fixes for virtual presentations
- Don’t start sharing your screen straight away. Begin with your camera on so your audience can see you as you introduce the purpose, context and agenda for the meeting or presentation. This helps capture attention and build engagement before the slides appear.
- Keep each slide focused on one key idea, with minimal text.
- Use larger fonts and simpler visuals than you would for an in-person presentation, making them easier to read on smaller screens.
- Switch back to full video periodically so that your audience can see your face. This is particularly effective when inviting questions, encouraging discussion or introducing a new section or key point.
- Rehearse switching between camera and screen share beforehand so the transitions feel smooth and don’t interrupt the flow of your presentation.
Skipping Rehearsal Because ‘It’s Just a Video Call’
One of the biggest misconceptions about virtual presentations is that they somehow require less preparation than presenting in person.
Perhaps it’s because we’re presenting from our own desk, or joining a meeting we’ve attended dozens of times before. Whatever the reason, many people who would never dream of delivering an important face-to-face presentation without rehearsing will happily click ‘Join Meeting’ and hope everything falls into place.
As it happens, virtual presentations deserve just as much preparation, if not more.
Presenting online is a skill in its own right. You’re not only communicating your ideas; you’re also managing technology, maintaining eye contact with a camera, sharing slides, monitoring audience reactions and keeping the session flowing. Trying to do all of that requires effort and practise.
Whenever possible, rehearse on the same platform you’ll be using on the day, whether that’s Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, or Zoom. Run through the complete experience, including sharing your screen, moving between slides, switching back to camera view and checking that notifications are turned off. The more familiar these actions become, the less mental effort they’ll require during the presentation itself.
Even a single out-loud rehearsal can make a noticeable difference. It helps reduce nerves, improves your pacing and makes you less reliant on notes, allowing you to sound more natural and conversational. Recording that rehearsal and watching it back is even more valuable, as it quickly highlights issues you may never notice while presenting, such as rushing, overusing filler words or delivering with less energy than you intended.
Distracting Backgrounds and Environments
Every element your audience can see on screen influences where their attention goes.
An untidy or distracting background may seem unimportant to you, but it competes directly with the message you’re trying to communicate. Cluttered bookshelves, open doors, busy household activity or anything else that draws the eye can quietly distract your audience, even if they don’t consciously realise it’s happening.
The goal isn’t to create a perfect home office. It’s simply to remove unnecessary distractions so your audience can focus on you and your message. A tidy, neutral background is often the most effective choice. If that’s not possible, a professional virtual background can work well, provided it looks natural and doesn’t blur or distort your image whenever you move.
Visual distractions aren’t the only issue. Audio interruptions can be just as disruptive. Email notifications, mobile phone alerts, pets barking, conversations in the background or unexpected household noises all break your audience’s concentration and interrupt the flow of your presentation. Once attention has been lost, it takes time to regain.
A few minutes of preparation before joining your meeting can prevent most of these problems. Check what’s visible behind you, make sure your lighting still looks right, silence notifications and minimise anything that could interrupt either you or your audience. These small checks help create a calm, professional environment where your message remains the centre of attention.
Actionable tip: Join your own meeting a few minutes early and take a screenshot of what your audience will actually see. It’s often surprising how different the camera’s view looks compared with what you assume it shows, making it much easier to spot and remove potential distractions before your presentation begins.
Small Fixes, Significant Impact
The good news is that none of the virtual presentation mistakes we’ve explored requires expensive equipment or advanced technical skills to fix. In most cases, a few simple adjustments to your setup and delivery are enough to transform how you’re perceived on screen.
Successful virtual presentations aren’t defined by better technology. They’re defined by the experience you create for your audience. Every decision you make influences that experience.
- Where you look creates connection.
- How you position yourself builds credibility.
- The energy you bring drives engagement.
- The way you use slides directs attention.
- The preparation you invest demonstrates confidence.
- The environment you create keeps the focus where it belongs: on you and your message.
Together, these habits account for much of what separates a forgettable virtual presentation from one that feels confident, credible and engaging.
Perhaps most importantly, virtual presenting is no longer an occasional skill used only for the odd online meeting. For many professionals, it’s now a routine part of working life. Whether you’re updating colleagues, pitching to clients, leading hybrid meetings or presenting to senior stakeholders, these small improvements will continue to pay dividends every week.
The encouraging part is that you don’t need to become a different presenter. Small, deliberate adjustments to how you show up on screen can make a disproportionate difference to how clearly your message lands and how confidently you’re perceived, regardless of how experienced you already are when presenting in person.
If you’d like to build these skills more quickly, explore SecondNature’s tailored training programmes for virtual and hybrid presentations. Through practical coaching, personalised feedback and realistic practice, we help presenters communicate with greater confidence, credibility and impact, wherever their audience happens to be.
At SecondNature, we’re known as the Business Presentation Skills Experts, training and coaching thousands of people in an A-Z of global and local organisations. Whether it’s a team meeting or a high-stakes presentation, we help people become the confident, compelling, and memorable presenters they want to be. We don’t just train. We transform. View our presentation skills training and coaching reviews to check out what they say about our programmes. We have a wide range of customised corporate training solutions, both in-person and online, each tailored to your specific business needs.
