Being Cheryl: Social Media Marketing Tips from Columbus, Ohio

In order to sort through Tweets to find information relevant to your interests or brand, search.twitter offers advanced search capabilities to allow you to narrow content to meet your specific needs. They provide a list of the available search operators on Twitter. Here’s a miniature version of their example chart:

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Fortunately, Twitter has an advanced search page that allows you to do all of the above without ever having to memorize any of those operators. It lives here: http://search.twitter.com/advanced and it’s divided into six nifty sections.

Words:

What it is: Select which words you want to search for, which terms you want to ignore, exact phrases you want to find, hashtags you want to follow and the language in which you want to search. Mostly this is self-explanatory.
How you can use it: Filter out RT and Retweet to avoid seeing duplicate content. When monitoring for a brand that is a common word, exclude words that wouldn’t be associated with the brand (i.e. Apple, exclude eat and delicious.)

People:

What it is: Find Tweets from a specific Twitter user or directed towards a specific Twitter user.
How you can use it: View Tweets being sent to your competitors to gain marketing research insight. Set up a search to monitor all of your employees using an “OR” operator.

Places:

What it is: Enter a city or zipcode and search for Tweets within 1, 5, 10, 15, 25, 50, 100, 500, or 1000 miles or kilometers of that location.
How you can use it: Find Twitter users in your neighborhood. Monitor the buzz in your neighborhood. Find Twitter users near you when you’re traveling.

Dates:

What it is: Search within a specific date range, from a specified date until a specified date or on one specific date.
How you can use it: Review Tweets that happened during breaking news or a conference, excluding the aftereffect. Export Tweets before, during and after a crisis to measure PR effectiveness.

Attitudes:

What it is: Does the Tweet have positive words “I liked this” or negative words” I hated this” or is someone asking a question?
How you can use it: Continually monitor for Tweets about your brand with a negative tone - you may need to respond or take action accordingly. Mark positive Tweets as favorites and direct potential customers to this page for reviews.

Other:

What it is: Pulls only Tweets which contain links.
How you can use it: Search within event hashtags to find Twitpics. Search within X miles of your zipcode to find the top stories and events being linked out.

All searches that you set up can be set up for continual monitoring through an RSS feed - after running a search you will see “Feed for this Query” in the top right. You will then have the option of putting the feed in your bookmarks, Google reader, My Yahoo, Bloglines or a desktop application. Alternately, desktop Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Seemic Desktop allow you to run continual searches.

What other ways can you apply these advanced searches for personal or professional use?