Searching on Twitter
In our previous post, Twitter Commands and Twitter Glossary, we talked about some useful Twitter commands and glossary of terminology. By the way, we go into much more detail about our Infinite Pipeline Relationship Development process in our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for B2B Sales Success – Sales Person Edition. See the bottom of this post for more info.
In this post, we continue the Twitter series with some helpful tools for searching on Twitter and using hashtags.
Some rights reserved by Shovelling SonSearching on Twitter
After having no real way to search for years, Twitter not that long ago added a decent search on Twitter Webpages, and at search.twitter.com or at https://twitter.com/#!/search-advanced. You can search for keywords or phrases and hashtags, and can also save searches so you can repeat them later. The advanced search is actually quite powerful. See the following figure.
Figure 51 — Twitter Advanced Search
Twitter also has added a Trending Topics feature, which displays popular topics on Twitter, with links to searches that help you find the relevant tweets.
Use Hashtags
A hashtag is simply a way to tag a word as a keyword by preceding the word with a # sign (called a hash sign). Using a hashtag is a bit more specific that using a regular keyword and makes tagged tweets a little easier to find. Note that you cannot include any spaces in a hashtag.
Anyone can create a hashtag at any time. Whether anyone else uses it depends on how well-named it is, and how much you popularize it.
You may want to create or find a hashtag for your products or your enterprise. You can also “register” the hashtag at Twubs[1] or Tagdef[2] to make it easier to find. Doing so, however, does not mean you have exclusive use — or any rights — to use the tag. Anybody can use any tag for whatever use they like at any time.
Here’s a recent search for the hashtag #enterprise as an example:
Figure 52 — Example Hashtag Search
Next up: Shrinking URLs on Twitter
Searching on Twitter is the 109th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 304. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2
Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV
What Others Are Saying
“Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies
“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)
“Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances
I’ve been using this advanced search feature for a long time. I feel it has been 2 or more years.