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Extending from my previous post on What Treasures Can You Find On Twitter?, I want to now discuss how to search Twitter effectively beyond just using basic keywords.
Just like Google’s search, Twitter offers advanced search functionalities that can really help you find what you are looking for and filter out all the trash. Also, due to the real-time and conversational nature of twitter, there are some unique search operators you need to be aware of in order to search twitter effectively.
Firstly, to get a feel of all the advanced search functionalities, you should head over to the Twitter Advanced Search page where you can literally see all of the different ways you can search through people’s tweets. Just to help you get started, Twitter even provide an example page on how these advanced search operators can be used! By in large, the concepts are quite similar to the standard Google web search, but here are a few things unique to Twitter search and that you should pay close attention to when searching Twitter.
- BE GENEROUS WITH THE EXCLUSION OPERATOR
It is highly likely that your first search attempt on twitter will be frustrating as the results are littered with useless rubbish. This is why the minus or exclusion operator should be your best friend in any Twitter Search. Be adventurous and generous and add more minus operator as you search to help you narrow down to a particular area by excluding areas you are not interested in. Sometimes it takes several attempt to really zero in on the area you are interested. This is particularly true when there is a viral topic going around that you are not particularly interested in and every second tweet has the keyword with the viral topic, in this case, simply use the “-“ operator to zap away these tweets.
- DATE SENSITIIVE
Another great way to zero in on your search is to limit the date range using the “until” or “since” operator. If you know are only interested in people’s reaction about a particular topic from a particular date then limit tweets produced between the date ranges you are interested in. For example, if you want to find out about people’s expression and comments around Michael Jackson’s death, you would use “Michael Jackson since:2009-06-25” since he died on June 25 2009.
- FROM THE RIGHT AUTHOR
Whilst you can search for mentions of persons by including his or her name in the search strings. You can also search through tweets from a particular person by using the “from” operator. This is useful when you want to search through a tweets of a person or accounts that you know provide useful, relevant or trustworthy information.
Together with the “to” operator, it allows you to search for specific tweets sent from a particular person to a particular person, very useful for backtracking and following conversations effectively.
For example, here is a search for all the tweets directed towards Demi Moore and are all the tweets produced by Ashton Kutcher. Adding additional keywords in the search will hopefully produce some interesting results!
- HASHTAG
The use of hastag has caught on as an unofficial way of tagging a particular conversation. Hashtags.org lists popular and hot tags that you might want to include in your search string.
Most major events these days also tend to have an agreed hashtag that everyone use when they comment or joining on the conversation, once you know the hastag, including it will often dramatically increase the relevancy of your search results. For example the tag “#inauguration” was used as people were discussing and commenting on Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration back in Jan 2009.
Do you have any other tips? What’s your killer twitter search trick?
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