One of the most interesting and underused features in Twitter is the advanced search operators. They work great and help you find exactly what you need in an ocean of tweets and people every day.
Even though they aren’t hard to use, most people don’t know about them or just never cared enough to learn how to use them. So let’s change that, here’s a crash course in using the Twitter advanced search operators to improve your workflow and find what you need faster.
Let’s start with the basic ones and we’ll move on after that to the more interesting operators:
1. “social media” - will look for the exact phrase. If you don’t use the commas it will look for tweets that contain any or both of the above in any order, it’s true that the first results will have the exact phrase but if you scroll down results won’t be so targeted anymore.
2. social OR media - will look for any of the two. Although you might think this is useless when you first see it, think about it this way - people commonly misspell words and there are also different words that have the same meaning, so if you’re really looking for something and want to find all traces of it, this might help more than you think.
3. social media -marketing - will look for tweets containing social media but not marketing. So, using “-” you can exclude certain words that you don’t want to appear in your search results.
4. #socialmedia - it’s pretty straightforward and pretty used in the search box so you might already know it.
5. to:marketeer - searches for tweets send to a specific person, so in case you want to track someone’s engagement you can use this.
6. “water park” near:“new york” - searches for tweets about water park near new york, use this in case you want to find something near a specific location. Just keep in mind though that twitter bases this upon the location of the account that posted the tweet so some of the results might not be exactly what you needed.
7. near:LA within:20mi - finds tweets sent within 20 miles of LA . You can of course change this to suite your needs to any town, any distance.
8. fishing 
- How cool is this operator, it finds tweets containing the words fishing ( or anything else you’re looking for) and with a positive attitude. Of course it has its counterpart " :(" that would search for tweets with a negative attitude. You can use this if you’re offering a service to search for good or bad things about your service on twitter.
9. social media ? - You can use this operator to find tweets that ask a question about social media for example. If you want to go on a rampage and answer questions on a topic in order to make your account more visible, use this operator and answer those question, nothing better than offering a helping hand while making yourself known.
10. social media filter:links - This search will find tweets containing social media and linking to an URL, this is an easy way to find sites in your niche that are talked about on twitter. See how you can interact with them. The “filter” operator actually has a couple more useful uses:
- filter:retweets - finds only tweets that are actually re-tweets . Combine this with another term like and see what tweets went well and were actually retweeted.
- filter:replies - find only tweets that are replies. You can find people talking with other people and maybe hop in to the conversation about a topic
- filter:images - shows you only tweets with images. You can find images on your topic really fast, get in touch, use, re-tweet or just learn about them.
- filter:videos - same as above except it finds videos. Extremely useful when you want some high quality video for your search term.
11. social media lang:de - This one is an incredibly helpful operator. It returns results for a single language. In the example I chose German( de), you can use English (en) or any other language and search for something in that particular language alone. If you’re only focused on one language it will definitely help limit interaction with other tweets/people that you don’t want to interact with. Check out the full list of supported languages to see what you can use.
12. survivor since: 2015-3-27 - This date operator will show you tweets that were posted for your given keyword after the date entered, in our example after 2015-3-27 (year-month-date). There is the reverse as well, you can use “until:2015-3-27” and it will show only tweets posted up to that date.
Ok, so these are the advanced twitter operators, as you can see nothing hard to remember or use. Actually they are quite straightforward so why not start using them in your searches?
They are quite useful on their own but their actual power is unleashed when you combine them to create powerful search terms that will allow you to find what you need in mere seconds instead of scrolling down through hundreds of pages.
So, on to their advanced use:
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Filter and see only actual tweets that an account makes. A person’s wall can be full of tweets as well as retweets, if you want to only get an accounts’ actual tweets use this : from:User AND -filter:replies . You can see I’ve filtered out ( by using the - sign, all the replies)
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Find relevant articles in your niche and in your language. This can be really helpful for anyone doing social media on twitter. Use: social media lang:en filter:links . This will return only links for social media written in english. Of course you can use any language you want, or search for images or videos instead if that’s what you’re looking for.
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Find questions about a topic in a language. Use: social media ? -news lang:en This will find tweets that have a question about social media, not have the word news and be in english.
I am sure you can think of even more ways of perfectly finding exactly what you need when you need it, you have all the information now to create your own advanced searches on twitter.