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With more that 140 million Tweets sent per day, Twitter contains tons of information from the collective public conscious.
Twitter offers a free, public search tool that lets you search through every public Tweet over the last few days, and you don't even need a Twitter account to use it. But sifting through all of that information can be a bit overwhelming.
Here are some Twitter search tips that will help you find the information you need.
The Negation Operator
A lot of times the keyword you're searching for is used in multiple contexts, and not all of them are related to what you're looking for. A search for "apple" might return results about the technology company, as well as the dark red fruit.
You can tell Twitter to specially exclude tweets that contain a word by adding a single dash directly before the word. Make sure you don't put a space between the dash and the term.
This tells Twitter to exclude any result that contains that term, and helps you focus your search on the right context. So if you wanted to look for tweets that focused on the fruit, you might use "apple -ipad -iphone" to remove mentions of the technology company's most popular devices.
The negation operator can be used in conjunction with many of the other search filters, as you'll see below.
Retweets
You can look for retweets by adding "RT" to your query. Even when someone clicks the "retweet" button and doesn't actually add an "RT" to the tweet, it will still show up with an "RT" in Twitter search.
If you want to exclude all retweets, simply include "-RT" and you can focus on original tweets.
Tweets with Links
Add "filter:links" to your query to only return tweets that contain links.
One of the really cool features of Twitter search is that it "peers" into shortened links. That means that if you tweet a bit.ly link that points to an article on this blog, Twitter knows that the link contains this domain. So even if people are tweeting links to your site using different shortening services, you can still search for your domain and see all links that point to your site.
A lot of people use Twitter to share links to stories, but sometimes you want to focus on what people are saying, and not what they're sharing. If you're looking for opinions or feedback on a topic you might want to exclude all tweets with links by using "-filter:links".
Filter Tweets by Source
You can choose to include or exclude tweets based on where they were sent from by adding the "source:" operator.
You probably won't use this filter too much, but I've found it helpful to sometimes include "-source:tweet_button" to remove all tweets generated when someone simply clicked a "Tweet" button. These are pre-populated tweets, and normally they aren't really saying anything interesting.
Focus on a Geographic Area
If you want to focus your search on all tweets coming from a certain location, you can add "near:" and the name of the city. This is supported for most major cities in the world. You can also add a "within:" operator to specify the distance from the area, like "near:Boston within:15mi".
This only works for tweets that include geolocation information, but it can be really cool if you're trying to focus on a particular, localized event.
Even More!
For a full list of Twitter search operators, click here. You can leverage Twitter Search to conduct market research, collect feedback, or see what people are sharing on your website.
It's an amazingly powerful tool, and these tips can help you use it more effectively.
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