Twitter Marketing Basics - Searching

Twitter’s search functionality is a great way to discover new people and content, which is imperative for startup marketing tasks. In particular, it’s an easy way to find new Twitter accounts to follow. Type a phrase or hashtag relevant to your industry into Twitter search and look at the people who come up in your results. Twitter will surface a list of people who use those words or hashtags in their bios, giving you a whole new community to get to know. Follow those people, learn about them and what they tweet about.

Try searching for your brand or company name as well, to see what kinds of tweets are posted about you. It's also a great idea to set up ongoing monitoring for key search terms like these so you can keep up with the pulse of the conversation as it occurs. You can find new hashtags to add to your tweets and Twitter chats to participate in.

Beyond the basic keyword and hashtag search, Twitter supports a variety of advanced search operators that can further refine your results to only the most relevant tweets. For one, Twitter does not require an “AND” or “+” operator to search for multiple keywords. Just type together multiple keywords into your query and Twitter will return tweets that include of those terms. For example, “social media metrics” will find any tweets that include all three of those words in any order.

However, sometimes you might want to find tweets that include one keyword or another keyword. Use the "OR" operator to separate those terms, like metrics OR analytics. You can also chain together multiple keywords to create a more complex query. The OR operator will attach to the word that immediately precedes it, very much like order of operations in algebra.

If you want to limit your results to tweets that include a link, like an article in the news or a blog post you’ve recently shared. It’s also a great way to track link shares for a Twitter contest. Use “filter:links” to search only for tweets containing links.

Twitter search works best with fairly simple queries. We recommend that you only add in a few advanced operators per query and try to limit the total number of keywords in a search query to a maximum of 5-8. Most common and proven effective queries would be Username, Date, Exclusion and Specific Phrase. And now you’re done with Step 1 of Twitter Marketing.