How to Use Twitter Search Like a Power User

Daniel Lewis

From Daniel Johnson, Jr.: As you know, this month at New Media Cincinnati, we’re talking about building community. In coming up with a power tip you can use in building community, I reached out to Daniel Lewis, asking him to share how he’s used Twitter Search to help him in his own community-building efforts.  What follows is his guest post.

I leveraged the power of Twitter searches to help promote my podcast about how to podcast and Audacity (free audio-editing software), The Audacity to Podcast, which contributed to its being featured in the front page of the iTunes podcast directory. Read on to discover how you can do the same to enhance your brand or drive traffic to your website.

Twitter clients

There are many choices for a how you can access Twitter—called a Twitter client. In order to track your topics and improve your brand or promote your content, it’s possible to use the vanilla Twitter.com, but I highly recommend switching to a more powerful client, such as TweetDeck, HootSuite, or Seesmic. Each of these have desktop, mobile, and browser-based editions. TweetDeck Desktop is my choice and what I will use as example, but the same principles apply to these and many other Twitter clients.

The basics of searching Twitter

A couple years ago (or millennia, in Twitter years), Twitter bought a little company called Summize and used their technology to power the new Twitter Search, which yields real-time search results. To avoid confusion over quotation marks and search terms, I will show search terms in fixed-width (Courier-type) font, like this: audacity.

Twitter search uses the same simple and advanced methods as Google and other search engines and is case-insensitive:

• Type words to find tweets that contain those words in any order.
  Example: audacity podcast returns “How do I use Audacity to podcast?” and “I’m trying to podcast with Audacity,” but not “How do I start a podcast?”
• Enclose words in quotation marks to find tweets that contain that exact phrase.
  Example: “podcast with Audacity” returns “I’m trying to podcast with Audacity,” but not “How do I use Audacity to podcast” or “How do I start a podcast?”

Because I want my podcast about Audacity and how to podcast to be heard by people who are podcasting as well as people who may be using Audacity for other purposes, I simply search for Audacity. Although I don’t recommend it, if you search Twitter for that word, you’ll find the following:

• Racial slurs
• Obscene profanities
• Quotations from famous people
• Book titles
• Tweets about the Audacity software

The first five of those are either offensive to me or totally irrelevant to what I offer. Your own search term may also reveal unwanted patterns. So we need to refine the search.

Refining your search with boolean operators

Don’t let a technical phrase scare you away! We’ll use the simplest and easy-to-understand boolean operators, OR and NOT or -. These must be typed in all-caps. By default, Twitter is like Google in that it assumes AND whenever you type more than one word. Thus, it will find things that only contain all of those words. I think that’s logical.

• Use OR to run a single search that could contain two different results.
  Example: Audacity OR podcasting returns any tweets with either the word “Audacity” or the word “podcasting,” or even both words together! Do you see why it’s called OR?
• Use NOT or the hyphen - to find tweets that do not contain words or phrases.
  Example: Audacity NOT hope or Audacity -hope will not show me any tweets that contain the word “hope,” such as ”The Audacity of Hope” or “I hope Audacity can do the trick.” I use this to avoid tweets with certain obscenities or slurs that usually wouldn’t have anything to do with the Audacity software, anyway.

Combing techniques for true power

All of the above methods can be combined for even greater results. Here are some examples:

• Audacity -”audacity of hope” -dewey returns tweets that don’t mention President Obama’s book title or John Dewey (he said, “Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination”).
• Audacity OR “how to podcast” -”the audacity” returns tweets either about Audacity or how to podcast. Telling it -”the audacity” avoids a lot of the hateful comments (“She has the audacity to say that?”), but also means “The Audacity to Podcast” won’t show up. Oh well.

I still get a lot of irrelevant tweets, but this simple formula helps me more easily find exactly what I want. For example, I’ll often see people tweet, “I can’t figure out how to use Audacity,” to which I will reply with help and eventually direct them back to my site where they can subscribe to my podcast or find more answers.

This isn’t the end of how you can search Twitter! There are still ways to search by location, time, links, and more. Additionally, you can attach advanced Google Analytics codes in order to track how effective your Twitter search-and-respond campaign is, but there isn’t the time to explain that.

If you enjoyed or benefited from this article, please follow me, Daniel J. Lewis, at all of the following:

• @theRamenNoodle
• The Audacity to Podcast—podcasting and how to use Audacity
• Are You Just Watching?—Christian movie reviews with critical thinking
• the Ramen Noodle—clean-comedy podcast
• ONCE – Once Upon a Time podcast