You’ve taken the plunge and finally created a Twitter account for your business. You log in daily, or maybe even more frequently if you’re smart, to tweet and follow others on Twitter, but you’re still wondering how to really leverage Twitter and social tools to market your business.

One of the most powerful features of Twitter over other social media tools, in my opinion, is the ability to perform advanced searches and really listen in and leverage online conversations that may be important to your customers.

Even if you do not have a Twitter account, you can still use Twitter’s advanced search! You do not have to be logged in or have a Twitter account to use Twitter search.

Accessing Twitter’s Advanced Search 

You can access Twitter’s advanced search via Twitter’s Advanced Search form:

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How to Use Twitter’s Advanced Search

Here are just a handful of awesome things you can do with Twitter’s advanced search:

  • Find mentions of your business
  • Engage in conversations related to your business
  • Understand sentiment about your business
  • Find engaging content to retweet

Now, let’s look at some examples.

Find Mentions of Your Business

Let’s say I own a frozen yogurt shop in Grapevine, TX called “Cassie’s Frozen Yogurt” and want to know what folks are saying about my business. I can search Twitter for my Twitter handle, “cassiesfroyo” in the Words section, like this:

Screen Shot 2013-09-16 at 11.48.54 AMAnd, as you can see in my results, there are a few mentions for @cassiesfroyo:

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It looks like one of Cassie’s followers retweeted a post about a giveaway; someone likes the Hawaiian Delight and Cookies and Cream flavors; and I’ve discovered a new hashtag that is probably worth a second look: #yogurttweets.

Engage in Conversation

Now we can search for this hashtag using the advanced search form and follow the conversation by saving this search using the gear (settings) icon on the search results page:

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You can also tweet using the same hashtag and engage in the conversation!

Find Content to Retweet

Now, let’s say you want to find some great pictures to share and engage in the conversation. You know a lot of Twitter users tag frozen yogurt related posts “froyo”, so you search Words for “froyo”:

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Select “Photos” to filter the search results page. There are all sorts of great photos you can retweet and share with your followers:

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Understand Sentiment

Now, what if I wanted to understand sentiment about my business? Are there tweets about Cassie’s Frozen Yogurt that are specifically positive or negative? For this search, we keep “cassiesfroyo” in the Words section and then select “Positive” and “Negative” under the Other section like this:

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Unfortunately, there are no Tweets that include positive or negative sentiment in terms of happy/sad emoticons, but, searching again for Questions and Retweets, we find:

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Good stuff!

Any questions?