If you have been using twitter for a while you may also be using the search function on a regular basis. What you might not know though is that there are a variety of functions which allow you be be very specific about what you are looking for. Here are some examples of how you can use these in searches:
Starting with the simple search box
As with Google you can use the quote marks in a search, so for example, if you search for business woman the search will return tweets which contain the words business and woman. If however you search for “business woman” it will only return tweets containing exactly that phrase.
You can make use of OR in your searches by entering business OR woman the search will return tweets containing either, or both, of the words.
If you only want to find part of the phrase and exclude part use the search business -woman, the search will return tweets containing business but NOT woman.
Entering the search #business woman will find any tweets with the hashtag of businesswoman.
To search on people you can use the terms:
from:mfsadler this will find all tweets from the person mfsadler
to:mfsadler will find tweets to the person mfsadler
Using the @ sign will find tweets referring to that person for example @mfsadler
To search for places you can use the terms near and within, for example “web designer” near:Reading or “web designer” near:Reading within:5mi
To date search you need to use the format of year-month-day. For example to find tweets about personal branding sent since 1st December 2010 you would enter “personal branding” since:2010-12-01 or for tweets up to that date use “personal branding” until:2010-12-01.
To search for positive or negative feedback you can use the following 
and 
great for getting feedback on your brand! So just enter iphone for all positive tweets about iphone.
There are a few other useful searches such as the ? search. For example twitter ? will return tweets with a question about twitter.
Finally if you want to search on a specific subject and look for tweets with links to URLs you can use the following “personal branding” filter:links this will return tweets with personal branding in the tweet and a link to a URL.
All clever stuff and makes searching on twitter very focused. You can use all of these searches in the advanced search function on twitter (click on the advanced search to the right of the search box) and what’s even better you can even save your searches. Once you have created a search you will see the option “searches’ below the What’s Happening box on your home page.
I hope this has helped – if you found it useful please share using the buttons below and leave me a comment if you have any other useful tips.
