Advertising Agencies in Washington

7 Practical Uses of Advanced Search Operators
What makes the search operators quicker to use than the Advanced Search page is that you can type them directly into the search box. You can also combine them in creative ways to find very useful information. Furthermore, Twitter Search lets you create ongoing searches that deliver results to your RSS feed reader (e.g., Google Reader) for review at your convenience.

Here are seven ways to use the Advanced Search operators to help your business capture useful information from the Twittersphere. Have fun experimenting to see what works best for your business!

(Note: Twitter Search is not case sensitive—you can enter everything in the search box in lowercase. In the following examples, the use of upper- and lowercase is only to improve readability.)

1. Eliminate “noise” from your search results
Often when you do a simple word/phrase search, you get back so many tweets that you can’t find the ones that are most useful to you. Excluding retweets (when users resend another Twitter user’s message) can help eliminate a lot of duplication. Simply search on the word/phrase and append –rt to your query:

“Internet marketing Washington DC” –rt

This query will return a list of messages that contain the exact phrase “Internet marketing Washington DC” but not any retweets of messages that contain that phrase.

2. Use hashtags to enhance your search capability
Hashtags are words or strings of letters and numbers that are preceded with the # symbol. Twitter users include a hashtag in a tweet to indicate that the tweet pertains to a particular subject grouping. Hashtags make it easy for you to search for tweets that might be applicable to a particular topic. By searching on hashtags instead of a simple term, you eliminate any tweets that might include the term yet not be relevant to the exact topic you had in mind.

For example, if your company runs a special event (e.g., the Virginia Web Designers Meet Up), you could start a hashtag (e.g., #VAdesignersMU) that everyone in the group can include in their tweets about your event. Then, to find all the comments pertaining to your group, you simply enter the hashtag in the Twitter Search box:

#VAdesignersMU

If you want to exclude any retweets, you enter

#VAdesignersMU –rt

If you just want to find comments (excluding retweets) from a certain date range, you can enter

#VAdesignersMU –rt since:2009-07-12 until:2009-07-16

3. Find tweets about your company
To find all the tweets that mention your company name, you might simply search as in the following example:

“ACS Creative” OR ACSCreative OR “Affordable Creative Services”

Using OR lets you check for several possibilities that people might use for your company name in their tweets. In this example, because acscreative is also our Twitter name, this type of search will return mentions as well as all the tweets we sent out and any replies to us. To find only the comments that mention your company and exclude those from you or to you, you can enter

“ACS Creative” OR ACSCreative OR “Affordable Creative Services” –from:acscreative –to:acscreative

4. View tweets to and from your competitor
If you want to monitor all the tweets to and from a competitor that’s on Twitter (e.g., Twitter name acmevisual), you can enter

to:acmevisual OR from:acmevisual


5. Find tweets that refer to both you and your competitor in the same tweet
If you want to find all the people who refer to your and your competitor’s Twitter name in the same post so that you can be sure to reply, you can search for

@acscreative @acmevisual

Note that when you enter terms consecutively in the search box separated by a space, Twitter Search returns all tweets that contain the first term and the second term (and so forth) somewhere within the tweet.


6. Start conversations with Twitter users who live near your business
Are you a local business that likes to connect with people in your community? Perhaps you’d like to invite newcomers to visit your business or even offer a special coupon or discount to new customers. Twitter Search provides two operators to help you discover Twitter users in your area to engage in conversation: near and within.

To see tweets from people in your area, you can enter something similar to the following phrase in the search box:

near:WashingtonDC within:25mi

Note that if your city name has two or more words, enter them without any spaces between words. You also can enter a zip code or airport code in place of the city name. Twitter bases its search on locality information provided by users in their profile.


7. Become a local resource
Twitter Search also lets you discover tweets that satisfy certain conditions—for example, tweets that ask a question, those that have a positive or negative tone and those that contain links. By answering questions in your industry area, you can engage current and potential customers, help your community and establish your business as a resource.

For example, we’ve found that people have lots of questions about pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Here’s one way we can find Twitter users in our locale who have questions that pertain to that particular topic:

near:DC within:25mi “PPC ads” ?

This search would return tweets that contain the exact phrase PPC ads and ask a question, from people within 25 miles of Washington, DC.

You can use a similar tactic to find people who might be having a problem that you can solve [if they indicate so by including a frowny :( symbol in their tweet]:

near:DC within:25mi “PPC ads” :(


So, it's easy to see how you can quickly build some interesting search queries with the Advanced Search operators. Be sure to drop me a line about your successes!