Want more customers for your product, traffic on your website or followers on social media?

Richard photoRegister here to join my (free) realtime growth hacking workshop on 17 June, hosted by Betacowork. If you can’t make it in person, join the live stream and chat online (get a soonfeed alert as it starts).

A while back I started applying Lean Startup principles to a methodology that combines new technologies with realtime marketing and live community building. I wanted to gather, engage and influence crowds around moments on the web, in realtime.

I call these moments “happenings” online, and they’ve helped us to quickly grow communities and customers for our clients. I hope these 4 hacks can help you grow, too.

If you’re not sure what “growth hacking” is, click here. It basically means to test, fail, learn and grow, quickly.

Bring it online to reach users. Do it in realtime to convert them.

These days you can bring just about anything online in realtime. This lets you reach a bigger audience beforetime, interact with the crowd in realtime, and build a community over time. If you’re hosting an onsite workshop, live stream it on Periscope to engage a wider audience. If you’re attending a conference to find new leads, live tweet the three most interesting sessions of the day so leads come to you instead.

Have a landing page for realtime growth

This is a web page that exists solely for the purpose of hosting realtime happenings such as live streams, live blogs, live chats, launches, radio shows or sales. These days you can embed live content on just about any web page or social network. So decide on a landing page that works best for you and make it easy for users to share. This is where your “realtime marketing funnel” (and SEO) begins.

Start your realtime growth beforetime

While happenings online should be short (< 60 minutes), they should also be part of a longer story, one that brings better returns the earlier you start telling it. Once you’ve decided to host live content, start talking about and bringing users to your landing page now, even if you don’t know the time (or even date) of the happening just yet. This way you’ll start the conversation, buzz and social signals earlier, which means you’ll rank in search results earlier.

Build a social community in 60 minutes

“Live community building” is a hack where you grow and/or convert social followers in an hour. It might be a Twitter chat or live tweets, a Facebook (online) event or a Google Hangout. I’ve seen a client’s first Twitter chat attract 2,000 new followers. Find out what times your social audience is most active wRichardProfileith Buffer’s new “optimal scheduling” tool, and plan your live happening for one of those times.

Richard Medic is chief of happenings at happeningo digital agency and founder of Soonfeed, the first timeline of what’s happening soon on the web.

Where? At Betacowork Coworking Brussels, Plane 2 (in the submarine!) from 4PM to 5PM.

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