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How to get more from Twitter Search by using advanced search operators

Real time search is the new battle ground for search engines. The driving force behind this shift is undoubtedly Twitter, who have place search more centrally within their product offering.

Twitter search offers an unparalleled opportunity find out what people are talking about right now. For brand owners this can give a great snapshot of what your customers and the market is saying about you and your competitors.

But are you getting all you can from searching on Twitter? Thanks to some cool search operators it’s possible to dig even deeper onto your Twitter search data.

For the uninitiated, a search ‘operator’ a symbol or word used in conjunction your search keyword that allows you to be more specific about the circumstances in which that keyword has been used. Whilst all search engines allow the use of operators, Twitter has made these more accessible than most.

Using Operators on Twitter allows you to bypass using the advanced search form. The upside is that you can type operators directly into the search box, which saves lots of time. They also allow you to do a lot more than the form alone.

At the basic level, there’s the exact match operator ” ” that allows you find just exact matches of a keyword phrase. This is going to be particularly useful to cut through the noise if you are looking for mentions of a multi word brand name.

The word ‘from:’ and ‘to:’ in association with a username lets you find out what particular users are sending and receiving. This gives good insight into how your competition is using Twitter: Are they getting asked sales questions or price quotes? Or are using Twitter to deal with support issues? Are they using Twitter more effectively than you – and what can you learn from that?

The operators ‘since:’ and ‘until:’ lets you find Tweets that have happened within a period of time. This is a great way to discover how an event is discussed at the time that it’s happening, as opposed to retrospectively. You can also use this to look at how your competitors have changed their use of Twitter over time.

Perhaps the most insightful operator are the and symbols. These allow you to search for tweets that have a particular ‘attitude’. For example, to find out how you or a competitor has been mentioned in a positive way, search for your brand + . The results will show all Tweets that have used common ‘Smilies’ and other positive statements.

The ‘near:’ operator lets you specify the location of Tweets, and set a radius around which you want to find all mentions of a particular keyword. This is good way to find out how far your sphere of influenced goes if you have a fixed place of business, such as a shop.

For the more advanced user, the operator “filter:links” lets you search for Tweets that just include links to other sites. This is an effective way to discover if your competitors are making use of their follower base to push traffic to their website. This might allow you to see when their followers like a particular offer they have on. Or it might allow you to see how effective a traffic driving competition is.

Here’s an image the operators:

For a full list, have a look here.
Try some out and let us know how you got on.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Search Engines, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.