While some may argue that FriendFeed is more “real time” than Twitter, Twitter is still the bigger player in the “social network league”. Here’s some great tips on how to get the best out of Twitter search.
1: Stay updated with topics you care about.
I like to keep up to date with Apple and iPhone news. But what if I also wanted Palm Pre in that cocktail but avoid all the retweets, well, you should simply do a search like this:
apple OR iphone OR “palm pre” -rt filter:links
2: Managing multiple Twitter accounts but still want to stay updated on them all?
Some users might have multiple Twitter accounts, and it would be nice to see all messages to all your accounts, regardless of which one you’re logged in to, at the moment:
to:techpatio OR to:techpatio1 OR to:techpatio2 (you catch the drift…. very simple)
3: Find out who’s talking about you (behind your back?)
As you probably know (you should by know!), a tweet containing your username with a leading @, like @techpatio, will show up in your “mentions”-list. Somebody might still talk about you, without putting @ in front of your username, e.g. if they don’t want to disturb you by mentioning your name.
Searching like this, will give you results including your name and filter out tweets you yourself are making:
techpatio -to:techpatio -from:techpatio -@techpatio
4: Only see tweets that contain links
One of the (my) biggest problem with Twitter is, that you can’t group your “followings” into groups (unless you use a 3rd party app, probably). So you don’t really get to decide what you want to see. Some users tweet really interesting links to articles, while they may also be having alot of chit chat going on, that I don’t really care about. Filter out what’s not important to you, by searching like this (not that I’m actually using this particular search, I don’t mind ijustine’s non-link tweets at all):
from:ijustine filter:links
5: Turn Twitter into a gallery about a certain topic
You want to see all the pictures on a certain topic, for example anything related to San Francisco. This search will show you tweets containg links to the most used photo upload services associated with Twitters:
“san francisco” twitpic OR post.ly OR twitgoo OR yfrog OR pikchur filter:links
6: Using your business on Twitter and would like to follow your competitors?
If your competitor is SHOUTcastRadio radio (just an example!) and you would like to see all their tweets and their replies, search like this:
from:SHOUTcastRadio OR to:SHOUTcastRadio
And finally, if you’re considering getting seriously into Twitter…
… you should do yourself a favor and check out The Definitive Guide to Marketing on Twitter, which lets you “exploit” the power of Twitter and tap into an automated traffic machine, building your lists, sell your products if you have any and grow your Followers in just 72 hours – or less!
That’s it, now you know a little more about what you can do with the Twitter Search and get the most out of your Twitter experience. Do you have any more interesting search methods I need to know about? Post a link or a message in the comments below.
Twitter is a good social networking site for people who wants to get updates from time to time. Got used with Facebook so when i used Twitter, it had me confused first. But I discovered that as you go along with, you’ll appreciate it eventually. It’s a user friendly site! You just have to explore the site for you to appreciate and maximize its features.
I think earning followers on twitter is a hard task, because it’s not like other social media just to post photos and videos and earning followers, but in twitter mostly of politics and science will work to make followers.
Thanks for the steps and I follow those steps regularly.