Below is an abridged text version of the video.
Advanced searches on Twitter are as important in making your internet use efficient as using keyboard shortcuts are to making computer use speedy and quick. So let’s a look at a broad search here, by broad that means that there’s no quotations – there’s nothing special here. Just two words; restaurant and Philadelphia. I’ve already done a search, in fact there’s one new tweet since I did it. With over 200 million tweets in a day, a search on twitter is querying.5 billions for your result. Granted, the majority of these are from bots and RSS feeds.!
Search For Local Tweets
And here are the kinds of results I’m seeing. Now both of these words need to come up in the results, and by doing that I’m kind of limiting my results because what if I want people that didn’t use the word Philadelphia that are actually in the city and are mentioning the name of a restaurant? Also, what if I don’t want people that are out of the city but commenting on restaurants in Philadelphia to be included in my results? Perhaps I wanted to see what the locals have to say.
The advanced twitter search form, loaded after an initial search query
So I’ve already done this search here, and after I do a search up here it’s going to bring down this new box with the search results – that wasn’t there originally.
Drop-down menu lets me move to advanced search.
And there, it’s got them in there but I’m going to take out Philadelphia and I’m going to actually cut it out and put it in Places. And then it actually is letting me choose how far I want the results to come from. Let’s say 25 miles and let’s search this again. So this time, you’re not going to see Philadelphia anywhere here, it’s just going to be restaurant. And now you have a totally different set of results here –these are not what we saw before. It has a different meaning.
Search Twitter by Sentiment
The other interesting thing we can do with the advanced search module here, is we can actually look for sentiment. Which is pretty fascinating especially when you’re looking for something on a large scale. I suppose what I would really love to see is to have the stats on how many results are being returned. But nevertheless, what if I want to find a restaurant with a positive sentiment? And in fact I’m concerned that it’s going to need to be farther away. So I’m not going to worry so much about people being near Philadelphia, but I want them to have a positive sentiment so I’m going to search that way now.
And here you see that somebody has used an emoticon – a smiley emoticon. So you can actually find tweets by “attitudes” so to speak. A positive tweet search looks at the sentiment in the tweet as positive based on a common, happy emoticon. A negative tweet turns up emoticons from people “not living life”, let’s just say. They’re interpreting this as positive, I think that’s – oh, that’s certainly positive right there. And this might be a good way to find restaurants that people enjoy although we also find that people enjoy Japanese food in Philadelphia, so it’s not just going to be the names of the restaurants. I could also use a negative or question mark in terms of the sentiment.
Now the other things you can do here are things you could use operators for but you could say this exact phrase. Another way to do exact phrases is to use quotes, and that’s basically phrase searching. Any of these words – well, that’s actually similar to just putting in the words in the search area up here. None Of These Words exclude what you don’t want. That’s great, I want to find something within a topic that is distinguished by a hash-tag. I could do restaurants, and then my hashtag could be “Japanese”.
Twitter Operator use directly in search box
Let’s take a look at Twitter advanced searches that require you to use operators within the search box. For example, we could use the From and it’s going to tell us that it sent from a particular person, you don’t need the ampersand. We could do it so that we’re looking for who the tweet was sent to. We can simply search for a particular user. That’s really important, use the @ sign so that you’re sure that you’re going to return the user. The Near again, sometimes it’s easier to just search it right in the bar and just use a colon – and that’ll turn out the area. You can also use Within and you can specify the distance. There’s more here but they get a little bit more esoteric. And if you need to, you can just go to support.twitter.com for more information. So that’s all, thanks.
Don’t Be a Twit: Get a quote from Eric Van Buskirk for an affordable audit of your Twitter, social media, and Search Optimization integration. Call today: (215) 268-6690
