Twitter Advanced Search for Keyword Research

Twitter is a hugely popular social media platform, the vast number of tweets sent each and every day and the huge volume of daily searches made are a testimony to this fact. Making plain text queries through the site is an excellent means of gaining insight and information into what people are talking about on the platform and which topics are currently trending. However, how many of the platform’s users are aware that Twitter provides an option for more advanced searches?

Twitter Advanced Search Tool

Not all of the platform’s users are aware that Twitter provides “Twitter advanced search”. Below is a guide on how to use Twitter advanced search for Twitter search and keyword research. The Twitter advanced search feature is where users can narrow down their queries until they have achieved their desired result.

The Advanced search feature provides users with the option to search the platform using a variety of criteria. These criteria include, “Words”, which offers users to search the platform using specific languages and hashtags. The Words search section also provides the ability to make searches around specific phrases and words, it also provides the ability to exclude words and phrases. Another criteria included is “People”, this enables specific searches conducted around areas including “From these accounts”, “To these Accounts” and “Mentioning these accounts”.

Users can utilise the Advanced search feature to conduct searches around specific places for tweets, retweets and mentioned conducted near to a geographic location. The “Other” section enables users to search around criteria including, “Positive J”, “Negative L” and “Question?” These criteria enable users to mine Twitter for data and utilise the platform to generate leads.

Twitter provides users with a quick and easy means of searching the social media platform through their operators and commands. These include:

• Twitter search: results containing both “Twitter” and “search”.
• “happy hour”: results which contain the exact phrase “happy hour”.
• Love OR hate: provides results containing either “love” or “hate”, or both.
• Beer-root: provides results containing beer but not root.
• #yolo: generates posts which contain the hashtag #yolo.
• From:user: generates results from a specific user.
• To:user: generates results to a specific user.
• @user: provides results referencing a specific user.
• “happy hour” “near: Manchester”: provides results which contain the exact phrase “happy hour” and have been sent near Manchester.
• Movie-boring J: displays posts which contain movie, but not boring and which a have a positive attitude.
• Work L: displays results which contain “work” and have a negative attitude.
• Funny filter:links: displays results containing “funny” and providing links to URLs.
• News source: TwitterFeed: provides results which contain news and have been entered it the TwitterFeed.

The Twitter Advanced Search tool provides users with an extremely potent tool, if users know how they can use it to their own advantage. It is important for users who are new to the feature to remember that if their early searches provide results which are unsatisfactory, that they are able to start again and redefine their search, or narrow their criteria. It is equally important to treat results with a degree of caution as they have been machine generated. Despite these factors the Twitter Advanced Search Tool remains an extremely useful tool which can be used by users in order to enhance their search results.