5 Twitter Search Tips to Save Your Time and Get Great Results

After the email, Search is the most important thing on the web. It helps us significantly increases our

knowledge base about things that we care for. And Twitter, being thepowerful content churning

engine that it is, has developed its search feature, making it an important insight gathering

activity. But sieving through the data that the Twitter search   produces is a time consuming activity.

If you know the things I am going to discuss below, you can save your time and find relevant tweets

within minutes.

Use filter: Links to find tweets with links

Often, there will be times when you want to see if your link has been tweeted, or better still, how

many times your link was shared on Twitter. Trying to get this information by simply entering your

company’s name as the main keyword in Twitter search is sure to give you a headache. There is an

easy way to do so, and it is to include filter:links in the search string. When this command is

entered, Twitter will only show tweets for a key phrase that has a link in it. The following image will

show you what kind of results I got when I used the above command with the key phrase ‘social

media.’

Search tweets posted during a set time

Let’s say you ran a campaign that started on 15th of July 2013, and today you want to see how the

campaign has fared. You can either manually scan through thousands and thousands of tweets, or

use the following command: since:2013-07-15. The result you are going to get will look

something like this.

You will notice at the bottom of the above image that only those tweets have been displayed which

were tweeted after 15th, but what if we want to find the tweets posted until the 14th of July 2013,

when you sent the campaign live? To do this you need to add the following command to your key

phrase in your search string: until:2013-07-14. The following image shows you the results.

To make this work, you need to mention the date in YYYYMMDD format (Year, month, and date).

Searching sentiments

If you want to search for sentiments in the tweets than you just need to include the following

commands with your search phrase:

To look for tweets with positive sentiments, use :) to the search phrase, and you will get a result like

this (watch for the sentiments expressed and the smileys used:

To look for

tweets with negative sentiments, add :( to the search phrase, and you will get a result like this

(watch for the sentiments expressed and the smileys used):

To look for

tweets that poses question add ‘?’ to the search phrase, and you will get a result like this (watch for

the sentiments expressed and the smileys used:

Search for tweets from a specific location

A lot of tweets that go on the web have a location stamp on it. This is a wonderful piece of

information for marketers who want to find active Twitter users from a specific geographic location to

target. Let’s say I am looking for people near Mumbai tweeting on topics related to social media. To

find it, I will add the following before the search phrase: near:Mumbai within:15km, where

you can replace 15km with any distance you want and Mumbai with any city. The above exercise will

give me a result of tweets from Mumbai and areas within 15 kilometers of Mumbai. See the following

image:

Search by source

If you want to check which medium your followers are using to tweet, then you can use the following

command before the search phrase: source:txt, and the result you will get will look like the

screenshot shared below. In the above command txt refers to tweets posted via SMS, and you can

replace it with mobile, TweetDeck, or any source you want.

Conclusion

As promised in the opening paragraph, using the above search tips will save a great deal of your

time, which you can use to analyze the tweets you find. But when using the above mentioned

commands, keep in mind to add it before the search phrase. It worked better for me than when I

added them after the search phrase. Hope this was helpful!

By

Bikram K. Singh