How To Search Twitter Effectively

Felix — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 02:23:00 +0000

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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What Treasures Can You Find On Twitter?

Felix — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 07:06:00 +0000

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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