Now that Twitter has added a search box on its home page, I often get people asking me why would I ever want to search through twitter? After all, isn’t it all about people going on about what they had for breakfast? Whilst it is true there are plenty of comments about breakfast cereals on Twitter, there are actually useful treasures if you know what you are looking for. Here are some ideas and examples of of some of the treasures that you might find useful but didn’t know that you can find on twitter!
- Find A Good Deal
This is probably one the most powerful and useful use of Twitter search and one that any bargain hunter needs to pay close attention to.
Many companies today are starting to use Twitter to promote and offload their excess stocks. Companies such as Dell regularly broadcast sales and discount stock through Twitter, It is great for finding good deals on all sorts of products when buying online, in fact, its probably a good idea to search through twitter when buying anything online as a couple of extra keyboard strokes might just save you a few bucks.
Whilst you can search directly on the twitter website for discount codes such as “Dell Discount Code”, there are also specialist twitter deal search sites such as CheapTweet that aggregates discount related tweets publishers and not only can help you find discount coupon codes, but also list general sales promotions that retail outlets are offering at a particular time, highly recommended for any bargain hunters!
- Stock Tips
The real-time nature of Twitter makes it a perfect platform for sharing Stock market related news, announcements, tips and discussions (or rumours!). You can also sometimes find links to useful analyst reports or analysis on a particular company that have just been published and that might influence your buy or sell decision. The trick is to filter out all the noisy tweets (and there are plenty!) by adding useful keywords and exclude noisy keywords for a particular search or use the advanced search options to add addition filter such as date range and hashtags.
If you follow a particular analyst or stock related site that publishes tweets, you can also use the advanced search function to search through tweets from a particular user.
For example, here is twitter search on What @TheMotleyFool has said about Google.
- Check for the Status of Web Services
Not so much treasures but definitely useful nonetheless is the ability to check for critical online services through twitter search. When you are having issues with Gmail or Hotmail, or Skype, it is often hard to work out whether the issue is due to the latest browser update you did, the new corporate firewall policy or something else. A quick search on twitter can often give you an idea if it is indeed a general outage from the service provider and save you the hassle of ringing up your Internet provider or corporate support desk.
Not only will the twitter search find other user’s experiences with the service, you might also find officially announcements from the service provider. You just might find links to posts on whether it is a scheduled downtime and when is it due to come back up. I have personally use the twitter search on Gmail down numerous times to work out what is going on with Gmail when I am having issue with it and see what the word on the street is, and found it a great time saver!
Go on, have a search on twitter, you just might find some other treasures, if you do, make sure you share it in the comments section below!
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To restrict search results to only tweets that contain links, add the command <> to your search string
@Doug Mazanec –
the command is filter:links
Thanks for the Tip Doug! Great one if you are looking for interesting links that people have attached to their tweets!