In the previous lesson I covered how to use Twitter keyboard shortcuts to turn you into a Twitter Pro. You'll be flying around Twitter in no time and saving precious seconds of your life.

In this next lesson we'll discuss the searching and all of it's powerful capabilities.

Intro to Searching

Searching is probably one of the single most thing you'll be doing on Twitter when you're first starting out. You need followers and you also want to see what's out there. How do you do that? You guessed it, by searching! As you start typing in the search box, Twitter will automatically list accounts that match your search as well as give you some search term suggestions. This is handy if you're searching for accounts but if you're not, just click the magnifying glass or press they enter key on your keyboard to start your search.

Top

Now if you do a search, for example "Make Money", you'll be taken to a results page that lists all your search results. First, there will be a couple of accounts displayed that match your term. Right underneath that are the tweets that match. Notice that the "Top" tab is highlighted. By default when you do a search it shows the "Top" tab which lists the most popular accounts and tweets that match your search.

You can browse, read, view photos/videos, and interact (reply, retweet, like, etc) just like any tweet that you see in your timeline on your Home page.


Live

If you click on the "Live" tab, you'll see all the tweets in real-time that match your search starting with the most recent. As more tweets come in, you'll see a "new results" link at the top telling you how many new results have come in since you loaded the page. Click on it and the new results will load. This is the case for any type of search.


Accounts

The "Accounts" tab obviously searches for accounts that match your search. It'll search both the account name and the description provided. This is why it's important to fill our your profile in full so people can search for you.

You can quickly see all the accounts that you are already following and see which accounts you aren't and easily follow/unfollow accounts from this page. If you want to check out one of the accounts just click on their image or name/account name.


Photos

The "Photos" tab searches tweets that have photos and contain your search term within their tweet. Since pictures say a thousand words, this is an easy way to visually see what you might want to read without being bombarded with text. Click on any photo to see the complete tweet.


Videos

The "Videos" tab searches all tweets that have a video in it and matches your search term. If images can say a thousand words, videos can say a million! Video is getting more and more popular as several social media sites promote the use of videos. So if you're looking for some interesting videos, do a video search. Just click on the video icon to play the video.


More Options

The last tab is "More Options". This allows you to refine your search. The first section is actually a duplicate of the tab options that are available on your page except for the "News" which is missing from the tabs.

The second section just filters based on whether or not you want your search to be done on everyone or only people you follow.

The third section filters based on whether you want tweets from everywhere or only those near you.

The fourth section allows you to save this search. After you save a search, when you click on the search box, you'll see a list of your saved searches along with recent searches. You can remove them by clicking the grey "x" if you want.

The other option in that section is "Embed this search". When you click this link it'll take you to the "Create a Search Widget" page that allows you to customize a widget that you can then create and embed into your website. Simply customize it in under Configurations and click "Create widget"

This will generate some code which you then copy and paste it in your HTML of your website and the search widget will magically appear! Cool huh?


Advanced Search

The last section from the "More Options" is advanced search. I decided it deserved it's own section here because there's a bit more to cover than the other options.

Words
  • All of these words - enter words and it'll do a search containing all those words in no particular order. If you have bunch of phrases in the search, you can use quotation marks like "make money" to separate your phrases
  • This exact phrase - If you're only searching for one phrase, enter it here.
  • Any of these words - you can search multiple words in here like "Money", "@Money" and "#Money".
  • None of these words - search results won't include anything with the words entered here.
  • These hashtags - this one is specific to hashtags and will look for the ones you specify
  • Written in - Twitter has 50 supported languages so you can specify this for your search
People
  • From these accounts - results will only show tweets from this account
  • To these accounts - enter account user names here and results will show public tweets that were sent to them
  • Mentioning these accounts - enter account user names here and results will show tweets mentioning them
Places
  • Near this place - You can specify the general location the tweet was sent
Dates
  • From this date to this date: - convenient way to search for tweets between a specific date range
Other
  • Positive :) - means it'll actually search for the smiley face in tweets
  • Negatvie :( - means it'll actually search for the sad face in tweets
  • Question ? - means it'll actually search for the question mark in tweets
  • Include retweets - will include retweets in search results (by default results only show original tweets)

Twitter Search Operators

Instead of having to go to Advanced Search all the time, Twitter has a bunch of search operators that will apply the same types of filters directly from the normal search box.

  • "" - putting words in quotes make it an exact match search. Ex) "happy hour" will only get results that have the exact phrase "happy hour".
  • OR - using or means that the result will contain one term or the other or both. Ex) love OR hate will return results that contain either "love" OR "hate" OR both "love" and "hate"
  • - (dash) - using a dash means to NOT include a word. Ex) beer -root will return results will beer but not root so results like "root beer" will not show up.
  • # (hashtag) - this will search for hashtags. Ex) #haiku will search only those with the hashtag #haiku. If someone was just casually talking about a haiku without the hashtag in front, those will not show up.
  • from: - must be used with a username to see tweets from the user. Ex) from:freedomhomeinc will show all tweets sent from that account
  • to: - must be used with a username to see tweets to the user. Ex) to:freedomhomeinc will show all tweets to that account.
  • @: referencing an account. Ex) @freedomhomeinc will find results containing that account
  • near: - used to filter those tweets sent near a location. Ex) "happy hour" near:"san francisco" will find all tweets that have the exact phrase "happy hour" near the San Francisco area
  • since: - used to only get tweets since a particular date. Must be in the format year-month-day. Ex) "tv shows" since:2016-01-31 will display all tweets that contain the phrase "tv shows" and was tweeted since Jan 31, 2016.
  • until: - used to only get tweets up to a certain date. Must be in the format year-month-day. Ex) "tv shows" until:2016-01-31 will display all tweets that contain the phrase "tv shows" up to Jan 31, 2016.
  • :) - used to get tweets with a positive attitude that contains the smiley. Ex) "make money" :) will show all positive results containing the phrase "make money" as well as the smiley
  • :( - used to get tweets with a negative attitude that contains the sad face. Ex) "make money" :( will show all negative attitude results containing the phrase "make money" as well as the sad face
  • ? - the question mark searches for all tweets that have a question. Ex) traffic ? returns all tweets that contain the word traffic and is asking a question
  • filter:links - filters only tweets that have links in them. Ex) "movie trailer" filter:links will display all tweets that have the phrase "movie trailer" and has a link in them

You can of course use a combination of the above if you wanted and do some pretty nifty search strings like:

@freedomhomeinc "make money" since:2016-06-01 until:2016-06-25 filter:links

which would give you all the tweets containing @freedomhomeinc with the phrase "make money" since June 1, 2016 until June 25, 2016 and they must contain links. Pretty powerful huh? Get creative with your filters and you'll get more specific results than just freely typing in the search box.


Review

So today you learned:

  • How to do a basic search
  • What types of results there are
  • Advanced searching
  • Twitter search operators

Hopefully I've helped you with some powerful options when searching. It really does help filter out all the unnecessary tweets. Remember, Twitter has thousands of tweets every second so if you want to use your time more efficiently and not get garbage results that you have to waste time sifting through, use search operators. It might be daunting at first but once you get used to them you'll be come an expert in no time!

How do you use the search? Are you using Twitter search operators to help narrow your search results? Let me know.

If you have any any questions or comments, please leave them below.

In the next lesson we'll learn how to build your network as this is one of the most important things in Twitter. If you don't have followers, your tweets won't be effective.

Tasks 0/4 completed
1. Learn how to do a basic search
2. Learn what types of results there are
3. Learn advanced searching
4. Learn Twitter search operators


Top Helpers in This Lesson

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T1967 Premium
Hey hun, i was in the Twitter training and i noticed that i couldnt find anything on a poll post ....a follower of mine sent me a tweet and i had to choose which picture i liked best sunshine on the beach or sunshine in the hills....do you know how she did it? i asked her but she said a friend did it for her :-) can you help me please :-)
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yakitori Premium
No problem. Just answered you in the other thread
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T1967 Premium
got it :-))
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rachelannie Premium
I'm so grateful for this tutorial, I was really stressed about how to get it to look professional, and now it's set! I am worried that my stuff won't go viral, because I'm super fun but my personal stuff never goes viral, so how can I get my business stuff to? I would appreciate any and all advice! Thank you!
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yakitori Premium
I'm glad you found this tutorial useful. There isn't really a set way to make your tweets go viral because it depends on a variety of factors like when you tweet, if you use trending hashtags, and of course you need a captivating headline with image or video. Doesn't hurt to ask to be retweeted once in awhile as well as stats show that something as simple as asking gets you more retweets.

Here's an article about getting your tweets to go viral
https://blog.bufferapp.com/3-ways-to-easily-go-viral-on-twitter
but I think I pretty much covered it in my Lesson 8: Building Your Network section. You can also search for trending tags and see if you can take advantage of them.
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rachelannie Premium
awesome thank you so much!!!
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laurenjean Premium
Oh my goodness... what a BRILLIANT training!! No wonder you couldn't wait to get started on training! You know your stuff & convey it superbly well. I love the lesson on Twitter Lingo. (Younger, hipper) people send me messages in Twitter-speak & I always have to ask for an interpretation or google it. Now I have a handy reference! Thank you!
I'll come back to this when I'm ready... it sounds very time consuming. I barely have enough time to add content to my sites. How many hours a day would you estimate you spend on twitter?
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yakitori Premium
Actually I maybe spend an hour in the morning for Twitter.
I talked about some good online tools that really help automating things in Lesson 8: Building Your Network.
I recycle my tweets with TweetJukeBox so it gets spread around without me having to manually tweet them.
I use CrowdFire to manage my list by adding back people who have interacted with me as well as removing those who have unfollowed me to maintain a good follow-follower ratio. You can also schedule your tweets with CrowdFire.
I use TraffUp to help get my tweets retweeted.

So everything is pretty automated. What I do in the morning is just check on my notifications in Twitter to respond to anyone interacting with me an add them if I don't already follow them. Then I do a search on Twitter for things related to my niche and retweet some of the interesting ones. Every time I have a new blog post, I will tweet it then I will add it to the TweetJukeBox queue so it'll get recycled automatically. Maybe if you don't have many tweets to recycle you should just manually do it for now but as you get a big list this definitely helps. Especially since you don't have to sit in front of the computer to post the tweet because it's scheduled automatically.
Read Lesson 8: Building Your Network for more info.
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Ultimateless Premium
I am stuck with finding that Trends box..I wonder if we have a different set up in Australia...can't imagine why. Where my profile picture on the left I don't see a trends box or in the photo top right, there dropdown box doesn't have it either. Am I missing something Yakitori?
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Jim-Bo Premium
I've also noticed differences based upon regional and time (meaning twitter or other stuff online revamps themselves) so a tutorial made about xyz might look and feel completely different depending on when and where you're watching it.

example when tey rolled out the video call feature in facebook about 5 years ago, they rolled it out regionally and gradually (to test it before just rolling it out world wide all at once.) it could be a similar thing!

here's an idea, try going through a proxy so your twitter account thinks you're in North america and therefore gives you the north american version?

use HOLA chrome extension for that....u can also watch tv from different countries with that...hulu, netflix, bbciplayer, anyone? lol

neat little extension that is! works a treat too!
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yakitori Premium
Yeah that is strange that you don't see it. Maybe the account is too new so it takes a few more follows before it can show relevant trends.
Here are some other resources where you can find Twitter trends for Australia:
http://trendsmap.com/local/australia
http://trends24.in/australia/
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Ultimateless Premium
Thanks Yakitori. Just found out your name is Andi but I really like Yakitori, it sounds so commanding...respectful! :)
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yakitori Premium
haha it's actually Andy. Yakitori is actually a type of Japanese food, kind of like grilled pieces of chicken on a stick. It's very delicious and is one of my favorite foods.
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Ultimateless Premium
Just shows you the other person spelt your name incorrectly and I should have known better...:)
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yakitori Premium
Haha yeah I saw that too. No worries =)
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TomasB Premium Plus
Same here,I couldn't find the Trends box as I went through the lesson logged on to my Twitter account.I live in Southern California.Really a minor issue though,Andy did a great job with this training.
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yakitori Premium
Oh that's really weird. Is your account brand new or did you have it for awhile already?
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Ultimateless Premium
I have had mine for years...
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Grandma1945 Premium
I enjoyed your training and found it very very thorough and useful. I have been on Twitter for a long time but never advertise with it. I primarily use Facebook for that. I tried to order once using WA banners and such. The ads were rejected by Twitter. The only thing missing from your tutorial was how to get around using WA without get it getting rejected. I know Pinterest will also reject if you use an actual WA link. I don't know why the ads were rejected as I wasn't really given complete information from Twitter. Just curious. Comments would be helpful.
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Ultimateless Premium
The links aren't rejected..I use them on twitter with a picture of my own choosing..
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Jim-Bo Premium
might be better to link to your site? that way round you are getting valuable visitors to your site and your site filters many of the tire kickers.
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yakitori Premium
I agree. That might be the best way to get around it.
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Jim-Bo Premium
I posted your tutorial (a link to it) on my blog today to get you some more reach!
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yakitori Premium
Wow thank! REALLY appreciate it!
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Jim-Bo Premium
you deserve it matey, you did a good thorough job...
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yakitori Premium
Thanks! Means a lot to me as it's my first tutorial
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