You may have taken a glance at Twitter’s search operators page. You also may have seen TwiTip’s 7 Secret Ways to Use Twitter. However, I have a slightly different point of view as to what Twitter’s function is in my life. For example, I would never search Twitter for interesting links and instead would rely on a 3rd party service like TweetMeme to organize this information for me. I also prefer StumbleUpon and Digg for finding new content. I use Twitter to interact with other individuals and answer questions I can provide input on.
The following are a few search queries I use and what I use them for.
near:x within:y
This query is easily the most valuable in my opinion. It makes finding other Twitter users within a certain area very easy to find and sort. All business minded tweeps should run this query regularly to connect with other locals. You can also push the query a step further by specifying keywords that can narrow you search. For example: Say you want to find all mentions of “free stuff” in the Boston Area.
-source:x
This one is pretty handy for filtering out spam. A lot of spammers will set up Twitter feeds that monitor Google for keywords and tweet every couple hours. God forbid you search for these keywords on Twitter because you will most likely be overwhelmed with redundant Tweets of irrelevant links. This is where a simple -source:twitterfeed can be a life saver.
-filter:links
While I think being able to search by location is the most valuable query, this one is my favorite. It makes finding actual conversations and original thoughts easy. I’ll usually couple this with -RT (to remove all RTs) and possibly a -filter:twitterfeed to get rid of some of the spam. Now I have an easy way to find all people asking questions about social media on Twitter without all the garbage polluting the topic.
I hope you’ve learned something new and can incorporate some of these queries into your exiting social media monitoring strategies. I personally use TweetGrid to monitor multiple queries at once in real time.
Are there any other important search queries that may be underrated by the Twitter community?
This post is part of the Magicomm series “Printer Tweet Tips“. To keep up to date on other posts in this series, don’t forget to subscribe to the blog feed.
