Search Engine Journal

You might be tired to see Twitter-related posts every single day but this shouldn’t prevent you from using the tool. To network using Twitter or not - is up to you. There are still many people who just don’t get the very idea of telling others what they are doing. What’s definitely should be taken into account: Twitter is a great marketing tool that can help you understand your audience and keep track of hot trends in your industry.

Now, to do that effectively, let’s look at how to search Twitter properly:

Use Twitter (advanced) search (formerly Summize):

Actually, Twitter advanced search feature is really unique and should not be taken lightly. Among pretty traditional options (exact match, language based, etc), there are quite innovative parameters: search by emotional coloring or sentence semantic structure.

Let’s overview briefly what we can do with Twitter search:

• Word-level search:
  • search for exact match: e.g. ["search marketing"];
  • search for any of these words: e.g. [search OR marketing];
  • exclude any word: e.g. [search marketing -seo];
  • search for related discussions (hashtags): [#seo];
  • restrict search results to any specific language (adds “&lang=” to the query string).
• A person-related search:
  • find threads by a specified Twitter user: [seo from:seosmarty];
  • find threads addressed to a specified Twitter user: [WordPress to:jdevalk];
  • find Tweets referencing the specified username: [search @mashable].
• Location-specific search:
  • find Tweets sent near the specified location: [seo near:seattle];
  • find Tweets sent within XX miles of the specified location: [near:NYC within:15mi].
• Date-specific search: find posts sent since / until the specified date (YYYY-MM-DD): [seo since:2008-06-25].
• Emotional color and semantic structure search:
  • finds Tweets with positive / negative attitude: [icann :)], [mccain :(];
  • search for questions: [elections ?].
• Search for useful resources - i.e. links to related pages: [seo filter:links].

Use Twitter Search Tools:

• Hashtags.org (as the name suggests) keeps track of all twittered hashtags (#). The tool also trends each one and shows you most popular ones:

• Twitseek searches for URLs twittered along with the keyword.
• Tweet Scan is a simple Twitter search tool (updates results every second);
• Twit Scoop searches and tracks the keyword-related conversations. It will also show you the trend for your keyword popularity on Twitter:

• TwitStat is another Twitter search analytics that not only searches but shows you the query trend.
• FireFox addons:
  • Be sure to install Twitter search plugin (bottom of the page);
  • Take advantage of this Greasemonkey Script that adds both keyword and people search to your Twitter home page sidebar.