Twitter Advanced Search 101: Everything You Need to Know

“Twitter is a great place to tell the world what you are thinking of before you have had the chance to think about it.”- Chris Pirillo.

Twitter Advanced Search 101-Social media networks have become necessary for brands to find business and spread awareness. For example, of the 187 million daily users active on Twitter, many are business accounts, and of those business accounts, 75% use Twitter actively to market their products/services.

As per a report, 21.5% of startups fail within five years of their inception, while 70% fail within ten years. One of the reasons they fail is the lack of the right audience to appeal to or sustainable revenue.

Twitter lags behind its competitors like Meta, Snapchat, and Google, with 463 million registered users in terms of the sheer user base. However, it offers functionality that no one does, Advanced Search.

While Google provides Advanced Search for YouTube for streamlining results, it lacks the depth and detail that Twitter can dive into, which is ironic since Google Search is the go-to search engine for almost anyone. So, let’s explore what it is and how it can help create a sustainable business for you.

What Is Advanced Search On Twitter?

As Twitter explains it, the Advanced Search feature comes in handy when you tailor your search results to exactly fit particular criteria. It allows you to refine the search results to find exactly what you want and achieve your goal.

For instance, Chef Adriano Zumbo shared a tweet about the recipe of your favorite sweet (like croquembouche) three years ago, and if you want to search for that, the Advanced Search can come in handy.

When Should You Use Twitter Advanced Search?

Capable of reaching 5.8% of the global audience above the age of 13, Twitter has been one of the go-to platforms for businesses and marketers. It is because Twitter has been considered somewhat reliable regarding privacy compared to Facebook and TikTok. Some of the benefits of using Advanced Search are:

Searching For Future Customers By Keywords

Every social media platform uses hashtags in some way today, as users have adopted them as a general way of interaction on social media. For example, Twitter has seen an increase in hashtag usage of 100% from individuals and a 50% from brands. So, if you want to understand what keywords can bring you in front of your prospective audience, Twitter Advanced Search can help.

Since hashtags have evolved, they play a crucial role in brand visibility. Furthermore, the underlying Twitter algorithm can help understand the likelihood of your post’s visibility depending on the hashtag used and make it visible to specific users only.

Use Case:

Let’s consider that you have a startup where you sell and purchase used cars, and you want to market your business. So, you can search for used cars, sell used cars, buy used cars, and collate all the other keywords and hashtags that can be useful for your business.

Understand Your Audience Behavior

One of the tools that can help understand what your customers expect from your business is what makes them tick, their likes and dislikes. It can be easily achieved via Advanced Search when searching or collating a list of keywords.

When the results appear, you can understand what the users are saying about the product or the service. This helps understand user behavior and create the right target audience to convert into customers.

Use Case:

You find the related keywords for your used car business. Now, you can use the tweets to understand what your audience feels about used cars and then use them to drive usable insights to improve your service offerings.

Identify Twitter Influencers Within Your Industry

As per a survey, about 3.2-37.8 million influencers are present globally. With such a wide bracket, the chances are that there is an influencer in your industry. In addition, it has also been revealed that using an influencer can increase the purchase intent by up to 5 times.

Advanced Search can directly search for posts with the most engagement and positive user behavior. This can help you narrow down the influencer that can be beneficial for collaborating with your business.

Use Case:

A few posts around buying premium used cars got a lot of engagement. You can check the posters’ accounts and see how much of their content aligns with your business’ interests and product offerings. You can then shortlist them to collaborate in the future based on that.

Level Up Your Customer Service

With the arrival of brands on the social media game, Twitter has become one of the go-to platforms for customer service. Many users tag the brand itself to get their grievances solved.

If you are looking for an aspect where your customers are finding problems, you can use Advanced Search combined with Sentiment Analysis.

This will help generate insights about the problem plaguing your users the most and caters to the resolution to alleviate them. Additionally, this will also improve the brand’s perception by paying heed to its customers.

Use Case:

People have complained about the high fees your used car service center charges for cleaning and polishing. However, you can use this as an opportunity to provide a flat discount on the next service for the overall invoice or just for cleaning services.

Search For Media Opportunities

Media houses are like any other business and scour social media platforms to fish for their next story, article, or interview. In many cases, they also put outposts inviting requests for interviews, stories, or collaborations.

Using Advanced Search, you can filter posts with the right audience that caters to your business. Good media opportunities and coverage play a key role in brand awareness, building brand credibility, and help reach a wider audience than general marketing.

Use Case:

Suppose you have been getting rave reviews about your business and the used cars you sell. In that case, you can decide to reach a wider audience.

Look for media opportunities with an established audience and cater to the autos market, and collaborate with them to highlight your business, your user base, and the user reviews if needed.

Competitor Mentions

As reported in 2020, there are 213.65 million companies in the world. So the likelihood of finding a competitor is relatively high irrespective of the field you operate in. And depending on their age, their market size, userbase, and brand perception would vary.

You can use Advanced Search to determine what competitors are being mentioned more than you and whether the sentiment is positive or negative.

Furthermore, you can also use this to understand the factors that have been helping or damaging your competitors’ businesses and implement safeguards or practices for your own business to make it better.

For instance, Kodak was founded in 1888, while Canon was founded in 1937. While Kodak dominated the photography market initially, their reluctance to adopt modern photography tech caused them to suffer setbacks in terms of market size and user base.

Canon used this as an opportunity to capture the market by understanding the market sentiment and monitoring Kodak closely. As a result, most users migrated to Canon, which now dominates the photography market with a 48% share, while Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

Use Case:

Consider that a direct competitor of yours is using the Christmas holidays to offer higher than usual discounts to clear their pending inventory of auto accessories. Despite the lower profit margins, their sales have increased remarkably.

You can use advanced search to search for their mentions, their products, or tweets from them to understand the tactics they used. From that data, you can derive insights to implement the same for your own business to increase sales while clearing unsold inventory.

Product Or Service Mentions

In most cases, Twitter users tend to tag the brand to call them out for anything good or bad.

However, there are also cases when negligent human behavior kicks in, and the users do not tag the brand, do not use the whole brand/product name, have a typo error in the spelling of the terms.

In these cases, you are missing out on the prospective customers that have been calling out to you.

Using Advanced Search, you can find all the people who have been trying to reach you without tagging your account. Instead, you can enter your brand name, product name, and the common misspellings for both in the Advanced Search to find all of the mentions.

Use Case:

You have posted about a used 2018 Mercedes Benz S Class Maybach available for sale with your business. But you notice that it is not getting the right kind of traction as others. Using Advanced Search, you can find out the product mentions with all of its iterations like “Mercedes S Class,” “Mercedes Maybach,” “S Class,” etc., and then reach out to them.

Lead Generation

After you have found people using the hashtags, keywords, or search terms around your products, you can use them to generate insights about possible leads for your product and service offerings. In addition, 66% of users discover a new business on Twitter itself.

Depending on the sentiment, type (review, complaint, appreciation), and the user’s vicinity, you can reach out to them to pitch about your business or services. You can even use the content within their tweet to answer them and build a rapport before launching about yourself.

Use Case:

Some people are unhappy with the auto maintenance service and the costs of the local garage in your area. You can search for users looking for alternatives and reach out to them about your auto maintenance service with a discount code that is a win-win for both.

Where To Find Twitter Advanced Search?

To use Twitter Advanced Search, you first need to be logged into your Twitter account. Unfortunately, the platform does not allow you to use Advanced Search without login.

Once you have logged in, accessing Advanced Search is relatively straightforward. Whether you are in the app or on the website, the steps to access Advanced Search remain the same. They are:

• Type in your search query in the search bar at the top for a website and the search tab for the app, and click search.
• Once the results are displayed, you will see three dots beside the search bar. Click on them.
• A dropdown list will appear, which will have the Advanced Search option. Click on it, and you will be able to use Advanced Search by inputting the requisite fields.

An alternative method of accessing Advanced Search is through the search options. Just click More Options on the top right corner of the webpage, and select Advanced Search.

How To Use Twitter’s Advanced Search?

In reality, it may seem easier said than done to use Twitter’s Advanced Search if you don’t know what you are looking for.

Twitter’s Advanced Search is relatively detailed and can get overwhelming to filter out the noise from usable data, leading you to go deep down a rabbit hole. So, it is better to know how and when to use Advanced Search for your searches.

In most cases, using Advanced Search would require at least 2-3 filters in tandem to generate actionable tweets. But there might be some that can work as standalone. The following is how you can use it well:

Words

• Tweets that include all terms in any order (“Twitter” and “search”)

When you want to search for tweets that just contain the words that you are looking for in no particular order but within the same tweet, you can simply type them in the “all of these words” section separated by a comma.

• Tweets containing exact phrases (“Twitter search”)

If you want to search for a specific term, you can write that in the “this exact phrase” section of the advanced search filters.

• Tweets containing any of the words (“Twitter” or “search”)

If you want to look for tweets containing any of the words you are looking for, put them in the “any of these words” section separated by a comma.

• Tweets excluding specific words (“Twitter” but not “search”)

You can put them in the “none of these words” section when you want to filter out or exclude tweets containing some exact words. The results will show you all the tweets that do not use those words. However, you will need to use this in tandem with other filters to get actionable and usable data, or you will only get unnecessary data.

• Tweets with a specific hashtag (#twitter)

Sometimes, you might want to join the world’s trend or wish to appeal to a specific audience. In that case, filtering the search results by using a hashtag can help. Just put the hashtag in the “these hashtags” section to filter the results.

• Tweets in a specific language (written in English)

If you are trying to appeal to a particular demographic in terms of language, using the “Language” section of the advanced search will make sense. Currently, Twitter supports 34 languages, and you can type in any of those to filter your search results to form your target audience.

Accounts

• Tweets from a specific account (Tweeted by “@TwitterComms”)

As stated in the example above (Croquembouche by Zumbo), if you are looking for tweets from a specific account, you can mention the account name in the “tweeted by” section to filter results from that account only.

• Tweets sent as replies to a specific account (in reply to “@TwitterComms”)

Let’s say you want to look at the replies an account is getting. You can then write the name of that account in the “in reply to” section.

• Tweets that mention a specific account (Tweet includes “@TwitterComms”)

If you are looking for tweets that mention a specific account, you can add that in the “tweets include” section to streamline the search results.

Places

The Places/Location field can come in handy when trying to understand the audience within an area for your business’ operational vicinity. For example, you can use it to filter the search results for a specific city, town, state, or even a country. This can help you understand the demographic you can appeal to for your products and services.

Filters

In the filters section, you can choose if the results would display the original tweets and the replies or not. You can choose to see them combined or separately as standalone. If you want tweets with links, you can also use the filter section for that.

Engagement

In a recent addition in Twitter Advanced Search, you can filter search results based on the engagement a tweet gets. For example, you can choose the minimum number of likes, retweets, or replies. This can help you search for an influencer or generate insight into brand perception, customer happiness, or product-market fit.

You can even use the tweets as part of your marketing strategy and retweet them to garner their audience towards your brand.

Dates

• Tweets sent before, after, or within a specific date range

Using the calendar dropdown, you can choose a “from” date and a “to” date to filter tweets between specific dates. You can even leave one of the fields empty to filter results before or after the particular date.

• Since the first Tweet, you can search for Tweets from any date

Jack Dorsey made the first public Tweet on March 22, 2006. You can use advanced search to look for all tweets since the first public tweet.

Conclusion: Is Advanced Search from Twitter Worth It?

Absolutely! It offers obvious benefits to both businesses and individuals and then some. Despite being another social media network, Twitter is the only platform that gives Advanced Search capability to all users, irrespective of an individual or business account.

So, if you are looking for something, the chances are that Twitter has some insightful information deep inside its “belly,” and Advanced Search is the neck that can help you reach it.