How Twitter advanced search works

Introduction

Twitter advanced search is an underutilized feature of a social media marketing powerhouse. And it's available for anyone to use. But all of its features can be overwhelming for a beginner.

Once you master the advanced search engine, you can easily find out which tweets get the most retweets, find users talking about your competitors, and much more. In this post, I'm going to walk you through step-by-step on how to start using Twitter's advanced features for maximum potential.

Getting started

There are two ways to get to advanced search:

You'll see a window that allows you to fine-tune your search:

  • Words controls search around specific words, phrases, and hashtags
  • Accounts controls search around specific accounts
  • Filters control search for replies and links
  • Engagement controls search for tweet engagement
  • Dates controls search around a certain time frame

Successive fields are combined with ‘AND’ logic, meaning that tweets will match only if all conditions are met.

If you click the "search" button in the top right corner or hit enter, you'll get to the results page you know from basic search.

Word search options

This section lets you search for specific words, phrases, and hashtags:

  • All of these words matches tweets with all given words within the tweet text
  • This exact phrase matches tweets with this exact phrase within the tweet text
  • Any of these words matches tweets with any one of these words within the tweet text
  • None of these words matches tweets with none of these words within the tweet text
  • These hashtags matches tweets with all these hashtags within the tweet text
  • Language allows you to limit the results to a certain language

To separate multiple keywords, you can simply use spaces.

Be careful about certain combinations of these fields. For example, if you search for any of 'cat dog' and none of 'dog', you'll only get cat tweets.

Accounts search options

This section lets you search for specific accounts:

  • From these accounts matches tweets from any of the specified users
  • To these accounts matches tweets in reply to any of the specified users
  • Mentioning these accounts matches tweets that mention any of the specified users

To separate multiple accounts, you can simply use spaces.

Filter options

This section lets you set two filter settings:

  • Replies controls if "replies and original tweets" are to be included or "only replies"
  • Links controls if tweets with or without links are to be included or only tweets with links

Engagement search options

This section lets you filter for tweet engagement:

  • Minimum replies matches tweets with at least the specified number of replies
  • Minimum likes matches tweets with at least the specified number of likes
  • Minimum retweets matches tweets with at least the specified number of retweets and quote tweets

Date search options

This section allows you to set a search time window:

  • From matches tweets from this date onward
  • To matches tweets up until this date

Conclusion

The advanced search is a useful tool to uncover information on Twitter. It can help surface conversations, relevant hashtags, and terms that you may want to monitor for trends or breaking news. It can also surface profiles and specific content for those you are searching for by name or within a certain time frame.

By now, you should be able to use Twitter's advanced search to find exactly what you are looking for on Twitter. If you want to go a step further, have a look at how to write custom queries using Twitter's search operators.

And if you want to use the power of advanced search on autopilot, including even more search options, give Birdspotter a try.

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