The Secret of a Succesful Search at Twitter – Operators

Wrong question!!! Do you know how effective is your Twitter Search?

Twitter search is the next best search engine after Google and if you are not utilizing it, you are missing out on something very important.

Though you’ll find a Twitter search box on the homepage of Twitter, I would not recommend using that. You could rather visit the dedicated search page for Twitter at http://search.twitter.com.

The search engine at Twitter is similar to that of Google except that the search results will be from tweets at Twitter. So your intention of search will also be to find something specific that somebody had tweeted about the object in question.

Twitter is a place where a large part of the online business happens today. Hence its is extremely important for you to understand how their search works. Since the objective of every online business is to provide a solution to a problem, you will find a lot of your business inducers at Twitter. People keep tweeting about their problems, they ask questions on concerns that they have and all of this will in some way give you an opportunity to position yourselves as a brand or, a product.

But will a generic search for a term like “gardening” give you targeted results? Of course, not. You have to search specifically for things that you want to search. This might not be easy.

Like in Google, there are a handful, very helpful operators or, operands as it is called, in Twitter as well. If you know how to and where to use them, you will get laser-focused search results.

Search Operators in Twitter

Let us look at a few such search operators in Twitter.

1). Default Operator – It is the default search that you will do. Enter any term and the search returns all tweets that have both the terms in it.

2). Quote Search Operator – As in Google, just enter your search terms in a quote and it will return the exact phrase match results.

3). OR operator – The OR operator is used to search either of two terms. For eg: your could search walking OR Jogging, which will return the results for either walking or, jogging.

4). The MINUS operator – While searching in Google, you normally use a MINUS ( – ) just before the term that you are searching to filter results with that particular term. The same is the case with Twitter as well. Searching with the term -free will remove all searches with the term ‘free’ in it.

5). HASHTAG operator – A “hashtag” represented by a #, is a tag that is used for tweets that refer to a specific topic. For eg:, all topics related to dog-training could be tagged #dog-training. This way it becomes easy for anyone to keep a track of specific topic. At twitter search you could also search using a hashtag.

6). PERSON operator – In case you wish to search for tweets sent to a specific person or, tweets that have been sent by a specific person, you could use the “person” operator. This is done by adding either from: or, to: before the name to be searched.

7). REFERENCING operator – In Twitter, you use the @ tag to reference to people. For eg: if you wish to send out a direct message to a specific person, you can do it by just adding the @ tag in front of the person’s name. So a tweet starting with @dkspeaks will be a tweet that is referenced to that person or, a direct message to dkspeaks. Hence it also becomes a very important operator when searching on Twitter. You can search for specific tweets referencing to a specific person by searching for @ followed by the person’s name.

8). LOCATION operator – You can search for specific tweets on Twitter that are for a specific location. If you want to know about a specific restaurant near a specific place then, just enter the search term followed by near:”location” (enter the name of the location in the quotes) and you will get all the tweets for locations nearby the entered location.

9). DISTANCE operator – To the above discussed operator, if you add another operator specifying the distance from the location, your tweets will be based on this search. For eg: a search with the term near:LA within: 5mi will return all results that are near LA and withing 5 miles.

10). SOURCE Operator – You can search for specific tweets from sources. Since Twitter has an API and there are numerous applications that can help you post to Twitter, tweets could come in from a variety of such sources. In case you wish to search tweets from a specific source, you can do that by just entering the search term or, phrase followed by the source. For eg: A search with the following, “dkspeaks posts” source:tweetdeck, will return results for the term ‘dkspeaks posts’ that were sent from Tweetdeck.

11). QUESTION operator – As an internet marketer, I am constantly on the lookout for problems that people have so that I can provide them with a solution to it. This is where the Question operator at Twitter helps me. Searching with a term followed by a question mark return tweets that contain results where a question is asked for that specific search term. For eg: I search with ‘blogging tools ?’ and get a list of tweets that have some question related to blogging tools.

12). FILTER operator – You can filter your twitter search results whichever way you want. Just add the operator ‘filter:’ after your search term. For eg: a search with the term, jokes filter:links, will return tweets with the term jokes and linking to URLs.

Proper use of these operators or, a combination of these operators could give you targetted search results, which can be extremely useful if you wish to build authority. You can find tweets of importance which could be a trigger to newer ideas and thus newer businesses.