Twitter is one of the top social media networks nowadays. Even though there are rumors that it will be on sale anytime soon, the fact is that, according to DMR, 317 million people are using Twitter at the moment – a number that you can’t ignore.
So if you are investing your time and resources on it, you know that a significant audience won’t come without some effort.But you also know that more followers you have, more chances you got to be heard and achieve your goals.
But how you get your specific target audience to follow you is the trick part. Twitter is not like your personal Facebook profile, where you just look for your family and friends, and that is it. You have a business profile on Twitter, and you want new customers.
There are many ways that you can make it happen, and most of them pass through engaging in a conversation with your target audience and letting them know that you exist. Because, despite what some people still think, on Twitter you shouldn’t be talking to yourself but around a subject.
How to Search on Twitter
Your journey looking for more followers start with finding them. And for it, you will need to use Twitter Search in your favor.
The problem is that most people will just type whatever they want in that search bar at the top right side of the screen and hope for the best.And it will usually be something as generic and broad as “services reviews” or “shoes” or “best hamburger”.
But it should be just the beginning.
When you hit the return key, you will get a combination of results. And not all of them will be what you were looking for at that moment. Plus, depending on what you typed, you will get so many results that will become nearly impossible to screen them all.
So the first thing that you will do is click on “More Options” on your results page. There you will see several possibilities that will help you to narrow your results down.
However, you can go further than it by clicking on “Advanced Search”.
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How to use Advanced Search on Twitter
When you click on “Advanced Search”, you will see a form that can feel quite overwhelming or a challenge at first sight. But you should consider it as your best friend.
There you will notice that you can get more precise results just by eliminating some words, choosing a location, or a hashtag, for instance. You can also define a particular period so to get only tweets from people who have recently talked about your topic.
But it is at the bottom that you will find four options with an extra flavor. They will let you choose only to get positive or negative tweets, only questions, or decide to include or not retweets – if you don’t pick this option, they won’t appear in your search results.
Not sure how it can help you? So let’s have a look at an example. Let’s say that you are a retailer that sells flat shoes only. You can write “flat shoes” on “this exact phrase” for starters.
Then, you will pick your language and, if you can’t ship your products worldwide, you will be able to choose a more appropriate location.And if you don’t sell sandals, you might want to add “sandals” to “none of these words” as well.
It will give you a much better list in the end, and it is just an idea of what you can do playing around with the advanced search.
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Make it even Better
But you still might be missing a few opportunities not thinking out of the box here. You could, for instance, run a search for “high heels” and tick the “negative” box.
As a result, you will get tweets from people who don’t enjoy wearing high heels and probably would love to know more about your flat shoes. Got it?
And if you tick the question box to your “flat shoes” search, you might find several people in need of your expertise. You can answer their doubts, a great first step to getting new followers.
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The best Twitter Search Tricks
Now that you have gone through the basics, it is time for you to go deeper on your Twitter Search by learning some of the best Twitter Search tricks available – and how they can help you to get more followers to your business.
1. Get only conversations
One problem of Twitter Search is that it will also give you results for your keyword will be in the link. But what you are looking for are conversations, so you can join them and introduce yourself. To achieve it, add -http to your keyword phrase. It will let Twitter search engine knows that you don’t want any links, only discussions.
2. Search for your URL
If you have shared something on Twitter and want to know who mentioned or retweeted it, you might think you can rely on what you get from your social management tool. But you should know that it is no 100% fool proof. The only way to have a perfect and accurate list is by searching for your exact URL. And when you find it, remember to thank who did it.
3. Search near you
Make your location-based search even more accurate by adding, for instance,near:bostonwithin:10mi after your keyword. It will give you only people talking about that subject in the exact location you want – meaning that, if you are both locals, you can even chat away about the weather or the best coffee shop before talking business.
4. No Retweets
If you don’t want to see any retweets on your results, maybe because there are so many or because you want to hear from influencers only (those who started the conversation), it is very simple: just add -RT along with your keyword.
5. Positive, Negative and Questions
Did you like the idea of searching only for positive or negative tweets or questions, but you aren’t very keen on using the Advanced Search? Then just add 🙂, 🙁 , or a question mark to your search bar. The search engine will do the rest.
6. Search for a specific period
Also missing the up to/from option? Then add since:YY-MM-DD and until:YY-MM-DD to your search bar. And you can use them separately or together, as you prefer.
7. Search for a specific language
Dealing with an audience whose mother tongue is different from yours? All you have to do is to add lang:en to your search bar – here, en stands for English, so you might need to find out what is the acronym for the language you need.
8. Save your searches
Of course, after all this effort, you don’t want to lose your search results. You might need more time to go through them, for example. So don’t worry about it, as you can just save it for later. Just click on “More Options” on your menu, then on “Save this Search”. Then you can click on your search bar, and a drop-down menu will appear with your saved searches.
In Conclusion
There you got all you need to know to use Twitter Search to get more followers to your business. The idea here is to find people out there that would be happy to hear from you, so you can start a conversation.
And this is the best and proven way to increase your number of followers on Twitter as a business: by establishing yourself as a reliable and helpful authority in your industry. So make the most of it.