In Part 1 of his series, Global Social Media Coaching founder Keith Keller advised on how to start out in Twitter marketing. In Part 2, he shares some more ideas to make the Twitterverse an easier place for businesses and solo entrepreneurs to navigate, based on his learning programme Twitter 101 – Cracking the Twitter Code.

Listen to the full interview or read the highlights.

1. Sharing is Better than Chocolate

The principle of doing successful business on Twitter is to ‘give, give, give, then ask’. That’s why I say sharing is better than chocolate – it’s more rewarding in the long run!

People like to do business with people that they like. Sharing information first creates a trust factor as well as creating interest in your business and you as a person. It generates genuine relationships with your customers, joint venture partners and everyone you come across in the business world.

2. The 80/20 Rule: It’s Not All About You

This is not a strict rule, it’s just a guide. We’re all busy so it’s good to have a structure,  a recipe to follow, especially when starting on Twitter.

In practice, 4 out of 5 tweets should be content that is of interest to others. I personally go with 9 out of 10, and only 1 in 10 tweets is about me. The ‘rule’ is just a mental note to remember to generate content that is of interest to my tribe.

It helps us become global citizens – which is the essence of what I believe social media marketing is about, particularly in the Twitterverse.

3. Social Media is for Meeting People You Don’t Yet Know

When people spend half an hour a day or some other regular amount of time on Twitter they want to know that they will get a result. The question I get most often is: “is it working?  Is it worth it?”

Yes, it is, Every joint venture I’ve undertaken in the past year has been with someone I met on Twitter. I’ve had numerous clients come to me on Twitter.

Because I am an information sharer and a person who wants to communicate with real people in real time, when people follow me I follow them back and say hello. (I can’t literally say hello to everyone but I intend to talk to as many people as I can in real time.)

As a result of that philosophy I have met some amazing joint venture partners. I’ve done a whole series of webinars with people I met in different cities around the world: Twitter 4 Actors (London), Twitter for Life Coaches (New York), Twitter 4 Entertainment (LA).

4. Be Authentic and Find Your Niche

There are very important reasons to be authentic, especially on social media. You need to be yourself. Otherwise you won’t be able to carry it off. If you’re vivacious, that’s great. But if you’re not so naturally gregarious and are shy of people, that’s also OK. You can find a different way to tweet or a different social media platform to use.

The reason I say to be authentic and find your niche is that, once you discover the things that you do naturally, you’ll be able to pick the platform that suits you best. You may prefer YouTube videos, you may prefer audio so you might have a Soundcloud account or your own radio show on BlogTalk Radio. You might prefer to write, which means you’ll have a blog.

We’re talking here about Twitter. It’s important to be authentic there because it helps you focus your material, focus your attention on what’s important, so you can attract followers that ‘get’ what you do.

If you’re not doing it authentically there will come a time that you just won’t be able to keep up with it. I am a Twitter for business specialist because, quite honestly, I just can’t keep up with all the other platforms. So being authentic and concentrating on Twitter I can be the best I can be at that.

5. Automation Tools to Save You time

There are so many tools out there,it’s very common that people don’t know which one to use, what will help them. Finding the value in the tools is not easy – there are actually 1.5 million apps for Twitter.

Don’t despair if you’ve spent countless hours trying tools out, because we’re all doing this. I personally dedicate deliberate time to trying new sites because I want to. I also want to pull them apart so I can see how people can get value from them.

But the key thing is: what are you trying to achieve with your automation tools? There are a couple of important things:

• Saving time. You need a scheduling tool like HootSuite or Buffer for scheduling tweets ahead of time.
• Tracking what’s working. You need to see stats of how many people have seen or retweeted your tweets and what the effect is. Tweetreach.com tells you how many people have the potential to read your tweets.

Coming soon! Keith will host a free webinar, Twitter 4 Digital Publishers, where you can learn more about building your marketing, branding and sales via Twitter. We’ll let you know more soon – subscribe to this blog by RSS for updates or follow @keithkeller on Twitter.