Boost Your Twitter Search with the help of Search Operators

Hari B Nair

Junior Associate

The popularity of Twitter is increasing now a days due to the number of users, the volume of tweets and the conversation on each topic. The most attractive feature of twitter is its real time search. It is very important to be specific in your search criteria to get a better search result. Now a Search Operators are special words and symbols, sometimes followed by a colon, which when accompanying search terms instruct search engine how to focus the search. Like search operators in google, a twitter is also capable with the search operators to get more productive search results. Let me discuss some of the important search operators in Twitter.

Simple Search

Searching for the words Twitter Search will return you tweets containing either Twitter orSearch or Both.

Exact Phrase Search

You must use double quotes to get exact phrase search. For example if you are searching for the name James Bond, returns results where a page contains both the name James and the name Bond, but not necessarily the same person. Therefore, enclosing “James Bond” in quotes ensures that you only receive tweets from James Bond.

Hash Tag Search

Hashtags search help you to group tweets around a certain topic. For example, if you want to find twitter conversations for #socialmedia return all the tweets that contain that hashtag.

From Search

If you want to search the tweets posted by a Twitter user, use from:USERNAME. For example, if you want to see all tweets that A R Rahman has posted, just search for from:arrahman

To boost this search operator, you can add any keyword after this from search. To find how many times A R Rahman used the word lyrics, just search for from:arrahman lyrics

To Search

To find the @ replies sent to a specific user you can use to:USERNAME , for exampleto:arrahman

Location Search

Inorder to find how often the phrase Social Commerce is used by twitter users in Delhi. “Social Commerce” near:Delhi , this will help you find people with similar interest.

Since & Until Search

“Social Commerce” since:11-01-2011 will return you with tweets containing the phrase Social Commerce since 11-01-2011

“Social Commerce” until:11-01-2011 will return you with tweets containing the phrase Social Commerce until 11-01-2011

Positive and Negative Tweet Search

This operator will help you to monitor your brand or product or company in Twitter.

For example if you want to review about a specific brand or product or company, use apple :)for positive tweets or apple :( for negative tweets about Apple products.

Question Search

This is great if you want to add value to the network and raise your profile by answering questions, if you are a social media expert you can search for facebook? twitter? linkedin?to find question that you can answer.

Filter Search

To filter your searches so that the results only include posts that contain links, just add the filter:links after your search term. For example you are looking for links in tweets that contain the keyword ‘jobs’ use jobs filter:links

Source Search

To find tweets from a particular source, just enter source: followed by the Twitter source that you want to search for. For example you need to get the tweets that mention marketing tweeted by Seth Godin, use marketing source:sethgodin

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