Twitter Advanced Search Operators

Twitter’s a big place. Kind of an understatement really.

With over 6000 tweets a second finding what you’re looking for can be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Luckily Twitter comes with an inbuilt metal detector – its advanced search.

Power users of Twitter may have already used this search exploring its extra options to refine the search to get precisely what they want.

But don’t you find this so time-consuming filling it out each time?

Cue Twitter Advanced Search Operators

What even is an “advanced search operator”?

Operators are bits of code you can put straight into the search results to save you having to click through advanced search every time. They also give you more advanced options.

Below I’ve shared some of my favourite advanced search operators that help me as a marketer. I’ve included all the code so you can just copy and paste and change the numbers and add your keyword.

Most of the time you’ll want to select the “latest” tab when using these. I find that “Top” – the default tab – shows them based on the algorithm more so who you follow appears first.

You can also bookmark these URLs if you struggle to remember them. This is so useful for logging into Twitter and finding the exact content you’re there for without having to search around.

The complete list is over at Twitter Devs but here are my most useful ones explained.

“min_retweets: x” and “min_faves: x”

This lets you filter by engagement. So typing “#marketing min_retweets:10”  would show me all the tweets with the hashtag marketing that have been retweeted more than 10 times.

In action:

So why is this useful?

You can find tweets people are engaging with. This is great for finding tweets with reach to reply too and to weigh in on content that’s proven to be liked in your niche.

When trying to grow on Twitter you don’t have time to engage with an infinite amount of people. These filters let you be selective in finding tweets that are liked / have reach making your time there more worthwile.

It also helps research your competitors by finding the types of tweets or accounts that consistently get engagement.

Be careful if you’re using this as a “quality-filter” though. It might catch some however Twitter has a low engagement rate on average at 0.045% so you could be missing some valuable posts with this.

filter:native_video and url:youtube

Twitter already has a separate tab for videos but if you’re looking to surface the most recent ones you can use filter:native_video on the latest tab to show you only videos in chronological order.

Using url:youtube will show you all the tweets that link out to a YouTube video as well. Twitter has a limit of how long you can upload a video at so by checking YouTube as well you can see more of the video content being shared on Twitter.

In action:

So why is this useful?

If you’re looking to implement Twitter into your video strategy then this is a great place to look and find content ideas.

On Twitter, there’s a lot of niches where video content still has gaps and that leaves plenty of space for you to seek out your competitors and carve a strategy.

filter:links

This is a way of surfacing all the posts that have a URL in them. So “#marketing filter:links” would show me marketing tweets that link out to another site.

In action:

So why is this useful?

You can use this to find content to learn from and curate to your own audience. Curating content is a cost-effective way of finding content to share consistently without writing it yourself.

Twitter is a volume platform and to keep things productive you’ll want to be finding and sharing good content often. Being able to search for this good content being shared in your niche takes the guesswork out of what to curate.

Combine Them

You can combine these advanced search operators to add more to your search. Here’s one I use:

(#marketing) min_favs:10 filter:links

Especially for my last operator, you’re going to pick up a lot of spam links so it’s essential to have a filter to get only to the valuable content that your audience will care about.

Keep them bookmarked

Bookmarking a few of these lets you build lists of content to share that you can dip in and out of in real-time and are constantly updated as more people add tweets and share into them. You can even use them in a tool like Tweetdeck to get a stream of content you care about. 

And one more time – here’s the full list again