Hangout on Air

Step 1: Use Business Page for Hangout

Step 2: Create a new Circle specific to the people you want to engage with on your Hangout and then start searching for these people. Search for communities.

Step 3: Create an event on Google plus Event Page,Event Title, catchy banner

Now you want to invite the Circle you’ve spent all that time building out. This invite will be sent to all those in the Circle, so again the more time you can spend building out the Circle, the larger the potential audience for your Hangout.

By inviting people in this way, those that accept the invite will be sent an email reminder shortly before the Hangout is due to air with a link taking them to your YouTube channel where the Hangout will be streaming live.

Finally, under event options, you need to make sure that you’re marking the event as ‘on air’ – this is found under ‘advanced’.

You can also select ‘show more options’, which allows you to add your own website URL (this will become important and apparent later).

Make Sure you enter the Hangout at least 15 to 30 minutes before it’s due to start.

Find ‘Hangouts’ under the ‘Home’ drop down box on the left hand side, from here click ‘Start a Hangout on Air’.

Give your Hangout the same name as you did the Event to ensure continuity and avoid confusion.

As a general rule of thumb, I’ll open up the Hangout 30 minutes prior to the event actually starting. This gives me time to complete the following steps:

1. Grab your Video URL to embed on your Website/Blog

First things first, make sure you grab the YouTube URL of your Hangout so you can embed this within the dedicated page of your blog/website or wherever you are driving your viewers to watch the Hangout. The URL can be found at the bottom of your Hangout screen.

2. Ensure your camera, sound and lighting are all working correctly.

You can check all of this at your end, but it doesn’t hurt to invite a colleague or friend onto the Hangout at this point to do some last minute video/sound quality checks for the people on the other side of the Hangout.

Use headphones and encourage all your guests to do this same. This will improve the sound quality massively for those watching the broadcast.

Shut down all other applications that may interference and call degradation (Skype, Spotify, etc.).

3. Ensure that the apps you want to use on the Hangout are active.

There’s a whole host of apps that you can use to enhance your Google Hangout on Air experience, too many to discuss in this blog, however the two that I feel are essential requirements for your Hangout are the Hangout toolbox and the Q&A app.

The Hangout Toolbox allows you to use the lower third of the screen to promote your business and the hangout topic, in much the same way you’d see on a news channel. This is a great feature and adds professionalism to your Hangout. You can create your own custom overlay, this needs to be a 640×360 transparent .png file which can uploaded via the hangout toolbox.

The Q&A app allows those people watching from your Google+ home page or YouTube channel to type a question to you and your guests. This is a great way to interact with your viewers, people like nothing more than a ‘shout out’ during a live broadcast and this helps to encourage engagement.

Ensure you play around with these apps on your test Hangouts to get a good understanding of how they work and function.