How to use Twitter search
Social Media Toolkit - relevant section : Listen / Build
Twitter has a great search facility.
You can search for particular tweets , find particular accounts , ones really local to
you.
And look you can save your searches to go back to later.
Here's how it's done.
So let's imagine we are searching for perhaps charities in the local area.
So I'll just search on Twitter for Lincolnshire charity.
And click the magnifying glass to search.
Now the first thing Twitter helps you out with is some of the top results.
So usually accounts that have got reasonable following, that are particularly relevant
to you, that you've been interested in before.
And you can scroll through those and see if any of those are of interest.
Then you can actually look at the very latest tweets.
So anybody tweeting with the words Lincolnshire charity jobs in lincolnshire charity fundraiser.
So it's literally by the second.
Now a search could be for two words like this or it could be a hashtag term like this is
#lincolnshirejobs.
The only difference is there's no spaces after it and it's a key word that lots of people
might use.
Like open day.
OK so that's the top, the latest results.
Then you are looking for people , so anybody that's got the words Lincolnshire charity
or both the words in their biography so "Lincolnshire" , Lincolnshire river trust , there's another
charity . So you might want to follow some of those accounts.
You can see any particular photos or videos that stand out.
Again Lives is a local Lincolnshire charity I know.
You can just click on the individual ones to see the details.
Videos, news, periscopes that's the live video stuff that's going on right now.
But I wanted to narrow this down a little bit to make sure it's not somewhere further
afield.
So I can say search filters and I can click here.
And so I could say either from anyone or just the people that I follow.
I can pick the language the tweets are in.
So looking for just english language results.
And then probably most importantly you've got anywhere and you can change that to "near
you"
And this is actually one of the advanced search options.
So nobody has come up in the area that I've specified but if I click on advanced search
I can say.
Near this place.
So let's just say instead Lincoln, England.
And you can do a date range , you can even talk about the types of tweet , positive , negative,
if someone's asking a question that could be useful for gathering research.
So let's just say all of these words Lincolnshire and then charity and run that search now.
And look if I click on these 3 dots here I can actually say save this search . Save search
added successfully . Next time I click in this search box when it's blanked out , let's
just blank it out there recent searches is there and also a saved search.
So anytime you want to go back.
So you can set up a number of searches that you are interested in and then re run them
every so often to see if there are any new results.
Very useful indeed.