Find out how to see the number of tweets for a hashtag and learn some Advanced Search tips
that are hidden from Twitter’s Advanced Search form — don’t miss it, inside the video!
Hey, it’s Chia from Brand24 and in this video I’m going to show you how to see the
number of tweets for a hashtag and then I’ll also show you some Twitter Advanced Search
tips to help you break through the noise and find the best tweets —
Now, how do you see the number of tweets for a hashtag?
Well, you can TRY to do this manually, directly on the Twitter website (I do NOT recommend
this method and I’ll show you why in just a minute)... or you can automate counting
hashtags with the help of external tools and apps, which is going to be the best way to
do it in most cases… and you’ll understand exactly why that is after I show you what it looks
like when you actually try to do this manually:
So, to count tweets for a hashtag on Twitter, the first logical step is to round up all
of the tweets for that hashtag.
For example, let’s take a hashtag (any hashtag) like #ArtificialIntelligence and enter it
into the Twitter search bar.
From here, you can see the top tweets for your hashtag, the same tweets in chronological
order, as well as related accounts, photos and videos.
Now, let’s go to the Latest tab (just because I feel like this one’s the easiest to understand).
This is where you can see all the tweets for #ArtificialIntelligence in chronological
order… but since Twitter doesn’t show you the number of tweets directly, this is
where you’d have to manually count all the tweets for this hashtag... in this endless
scroll… like I said, it’s not the best idea to do this manually, but this is the
only option that Twitter currently gives us within the platform.
A much better way to see the number of tweets for a hashtag is to automate the process with
the help of external tools and apps that can track hashtags on Twitter.
I might be just a tiny bit biased, but I’d recommend using a social media monitoring
tool for this.
And I say this for 2 main reasons: one, because media monitoring tools (like Brand24) provide
extensive coverage of Twitter and show you a LOT more data beyond just the number of
tweets for your hashtag.
For example, let’s take the #MyCampaignSlogan hashtag from Jimmy Fallon asking his Twitter
followers to make up their own funny campaign slogan and to tweet it with that hashtag for
a chance to be featured on The Tonight Show.
Inside Brand24, we can see that this hashtag has over 1,000 tweets so far, we can see how much
social media reach it has, the number of interactions it got, influential accounts using the hashtag,
the context of discussions, and the positive and negative sentiment surrounding
it — and more!
This was the most popular tweet for that hashtag, in terms of engagement.
I’m putting a link to a blog post that shows you step-by-step how to find all this data
down in the description box for this video, so feel free to check that out!
The second reason I recommend using a media monitoring tool to track your hashtag is because
it offers broader coverage.
This means that if you’re using the same hashtag across multiple platforms and you
want to measure how many times it’s used on each platform, a media monitoring tool
can track all of that for you.
However, if Twitter is the only platform that you’re interested in, then you might
want to check out a Twitter management tool like TweetDeck, which doesn’t monitor other
platforms because it’s totally dedicated to Twitter, so you might even find some more Twitter-specific
features there.
I’d definitely suggest familiarizing yourself with Twitter’s Advanced Search.
Even though Twitter doesn’t show us the NUMBER of tweets for a given hashtag, you
can still find lots of important data within the platform — if you know how to use Twitter
Advanced Search commands.
We’ll go over the Twitter Advanced Search form right now, which lets you find the best
tweets based on words, accounts, engagement and dates, and then I’ll show you 3 additional
Advanced Search codes that are NOT on the form.
So, if you’re on your computer, you can just go to twitter.com/search-advanced
This brings up Twitter’s Advanced Search form.
First, we see the Words section which lets you find specific tweets based on words and
phrases, in different languages, and that use certain hashtags.
Next, we have Accounts, which lets you identify tweets to, from, or that mention specific
accounts.
The Engagement section lets you find tweets that got at least a few Replies, Likes or
Retweets — you can specify the amount.
And Dates lets you search for tweets from specific dates.
You can also indicate whether you want to see Original tweets, Replies or tweets with
links.
This is everything on the Advanced Search form.
Now, if you use Twitter Advanced Search commands (by entering search codes directly in the Twitter search
bar), you can find the best tweets based on even more criteria… for example, you can
find tweets for #ArtificialIntelligence that come from verified Twitter accounts only
by entering filter:verified #ArtificialIntelligence
You can see just tweets that contain pictures by entering #ArtificialIntelligence PIC.
And if you have Twitter lists set up, you can also identify which accounts on your list
have been using a specific hashtag by typing list:(your user name)/(the name
of your list, with hyphens where there would be any spaces) and the hashtag that the tweets
should include.
So there are a bunch of other Advanced Search operators on Twitter and we could very easily devote
an entire video to this.
If you guys want to learn more about these hidden Twitter Advanced Search commands, just
let me know in the Comments section of this video, and we’ll cover it.
Otherwise, I’m going to stop here because... we’ve already covered a lot today and...
I wanna save something for next time.
Alright guys, thank you, I hope this was helpful, and I’ll see you next week, bye!
be like... grunge rock...
Are you still here?
And... we're done (bye!)