Twitter Advanced Search: what it is and how it works?

Have you used Twitter Advanced Search before? Have you at least heard of it? If your answer is “no” to either one or both of those questions, don’t feel bad about it, because, even though it’s one of Twitter’s most useful features, it’s also one of its most underrated and under-used. Nevertheless, being aware of this feature and mastering how to use it can sometimes prove invaluable. After all, Twitter offers such a massive amount of exciting content with hundreds of millions of tweets a day, therefore, it’s almost impossible to find something specific without some additional filtering. And that’s exactly what Twitter created its Advanced Search tool for.

Why you should use Twitter’s Advanced Search tool

As Twitter has previously stated, the Advanced Search offers filtering options that can help you find very specific content. For instance, you could see every tweet about your favourite movie made today in the language you have specified. You could filter to see everything a particular person tweeted in last month. Or you could find all the users who have talked about yoga sessions. And so much more – just fill in the right fields to get the results you’re after. You could even find a tweet just by remembering a phrase within it — even if you forgot who tweeted it.

It means that Twitter Advanced Search could provide free market insights for marketers, help journalists with research for their articles and provide valuable data for researchers tracking shifts in the public opinion on various topic. Or, alternatively, it could just serve as a salvation for those who can never remember where they read this brilliant quote and how exactly did it go or as a way to kill a few hours for bored Twitter users keeping tabs on the latest Twitter drama. Regardless of the purpose you want to use it for, Twitter Advanced Search can help you find almost anything that exists on Twitter – if you know how to use it properly.

How to use Twitter Advanced Search?

There are many ways how to use the search Advanced Search feature on Twitter. For example, you can find tweets by yourself, your friends and countless other people, businesses and organizations, as well as content posted by public figures, from celebrities to politicians. You can follow ongoing conversations about breaking news or any other topic that interests you by searching for topic keywords or hashtags.

In the simplest terms, the way it works is this:
1. Enter your search term into the search bar on Twitter;
2. At the top of your results page, click More options and then click Advanced search;
3. Fill in the appropriate fields to refine your search results;
4. Click Search to see your results.

Of course, to get more specific results, you have to use specific search filters – a simple keyword search won’t do, if your goal is to create a detailed data set. That’s where all the available search fields come into play – use them to narrow down your search to specific accounts, languages, locations and time periods to find what you’re looking for. To refine your advanced search results, make your searches more specific by using any combination of the following fields:

Keywords:

· Tweets containing all words in any position
· Tweets containing exact phrases
· Tweets containing any of the words
· Tweets excluding specific words
· Tweets with a specific hashtag
· Tweets in a specific language

Accounts:

· Tweets from a specific account
· Tweets sent as replies to a specific account
· Tweets that mention a specific account

Engagement

· Select the minimum amount of likes, retweets and replies

Dates

· Use the calendar dropdown to select tweets sent before a specific date, after a specific date or within a date range – you can search for tweets from any date since the first public tweet

Using these fields, you should be able to get more insightful search results and create precise data sets that correspond to the goals of your search.

What are the limitations of Twitter Advanced Search?

Even though Twitter Advanced Search is an amazing tool, there are still some things that it won’t be able to do. First of all, it won’t be able to find deleted tweets. In fact, there is no guaranteed way to do it at all, and for a good reason, because allowing that would be a serious infringement of the users’ privacy. Your own tweets, however, are an exception to this – TweetDeleter offers a feature that will allow you to save and see your deleted tweets at any time.

Secondly, Twitter's advanced search no longer offers the option to search by location – this feature used to be available on Twitter’s Advanced Search but, for some reason, it has been removed. With that said, you can still select the location of tweets in Twitter’s regular search results, however, it only offers two options: either “near you” or “anywhere”. Therefore, it will be of no use if your goal is to select tweets made from a certain location.

Another thing that could be very useful for many searches but isn’t included, is the option to sort the results, for example, by the latest or oldest tweet, the number of likes and other parameters. Of course, many of those things can be narrowed down using the advanced search filters, but it would still be useful to sort the returned results so that you can start from the most popular tweet etc.

If you’re trying to search only through tweets made by your account, you can actually find the option to sort tweets in TweetDeleter - using its dashboard, you can sort the tweets by their age, as well as the number of retweets and likes they have received. In fact, TweetDeleter can do a few more things that can’t even be achieved using Advanced Search on Twitter, for example, you can filter tweets by media they feature, filter out retweets and even find tweets with profanities in them. Of course, that only applies to your own tweets, but in many cases, that’s exactly what people are after.

Nonetheless, even with its limitations, Twitter Advanced Search is a great tool that can help you hunt down leads, discover new trends, and find other valuable information in a much easier way. Whether you’re using it for research or fun, it allows you to create complex searches with keywords that are relevant to you and find exactly what you were looking for, instead of aimlessly scrolling through thousands of other people’s tweets to find the right one. Meanwhile, if you’d like to sift through your own tweets, the features offered by TweetDeleter can make your search even more precise.