Ever tried and failed to find a tweet you’d forgotten to like? Or had something you saw on Twitter niggle away at you? Ever wished there were Twitter hacks to help you out?
Bet you didn’t realise just how searchable Twitter is.
At Only Digital, we’ve years of expertise in running social media accounts – and we’ve picked up some useful hints and tips about Twitter over that time.
All you need to know for starters is where the search box is.
Here is our handful of Twitter hacks that will revolutionise your social media searching…
Finding tweets from someone:
Have you got their username? Good, you’ll need it. In the search box, type “from:username”.
That will give you all of their tweets, in reverse chronological order.
So here we have tweets from Tesco – “from:tesco”:
Want to find out what they’ve been tweeting about a particular subject, such as recipes? Type “from:username recipes”. This works for any search term you like.
And here are tweets from Tesco that feature the word recipes – “from:tesco recipes”:
Finding a tweet sent to someone:
Just type “to:username”. This is how you’d find tweets to the BBC – “to:BBC”:
Again, you can add a search term. This time, flood – “to:BBC flood”:
And you can find one user’s tweets to a particular person – if you’ve got both usernames – by typing “from:username1 to:username2”.
So tweets from Kim Kardashian to her sister Kourtney, you’d type “from:KimKardashian to:kourtneykardash”:
Filtering results:
This helps sort the wheat from the chaff and can be added after “from:username”.
Want only verified accounts? Type: “filter:verified”.
Want images? “filter:images”.
Need video or images: “filter:media”.
Just native video? “filter:native_video”.
Looking for retweets? “filter:retweets”.
Greater relevance:
If you put a minus (-) before the filter term, you get the opposite result. So “-filter:replies” will list tweets without their replies, for example.
Timing’s crucial:
Looking for a particular tweet from a particular time but don’t fancy scrolling through hundreds of them?
But you’re going to need to think about your dates. Pay attention to the format – separated by dashes it goes, year (four figures)-month (two figures)-day (two figures).
So, if you’re looking for a search term, or a particular person’s tweet, between January 1, 2018 (01/01/2018) and January 2, 2018 (02/01/2018), you’d append “since:2018-01-01 until:2018-01-02”.
Here’s an example using avocados between those dates – “avocados since:2018-01-01 until:2018-01-02”:
Location, location, location:
You can narrow down your search to a particular geographical area. What, for example, are the people of Leeds worrying about? Type “near:leeds,uk within:5mi”. The results are tweeted by people from that area:
And, again, you can include other search terms.
Tiny tips:
If you put your search terms in inverted commas, you will only get exact matches of the phrase. So “Taylor Swift news” returns only that.
If you type OR in capitals between search terms, you’ll get matches for either term.
If you want to exclude a word from your search – perhaps you want to know about recipes but not anything low calorie – put a minus (-) before the term you’re ignoring. Thus, your search would be “recipes -calorie”.
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