For those who are less familiar with Twitter search and the potential it offers, we know it can be difficult to decide which searches will be relevant and which won’t. But setting up a few Twilerts is the first step to success and by trial and error, the refining of keywords and a little experimentation, the results of monitoring your brand properly on social media are unparalleled. So in order to help you get started, we’ve put together this quick guide, filled with top tips for setting up your first Twilert and finding success through Twitter search.

Setting Up Social Media Monitoring Guide

1. Working out what you want to search for
Before you dive in, take a few moments to think about what you want Twitter Search to achieve for your business. Perhaps you’ve missed a few important tweets and want to ensure your team are notified immediately by email, to save upsetting future customers. Or perhaps you want to gain more followers on Twitter and so need to find the users who are already engaged with the type of product or services you offer. Or maybe you just want to monitor some of the discussions around your industry, to work out what type of keywords and content you should be producing on your website. Whichever your motive, it’s a good idea to get this clear in your mind to begin with as this will help you to refine your search and find the results that matter.

2. The difference between OR and AND
One of the most common mistakes we see when on Twilert (and Twitter search itself), is users who enter all of their keywords in one Twilert search. As we explain further in this video, between every word or phrase you enter into Twitter search (or Twilert), there is an invisible ‘AND’ inserted. This means, that if you create the below search, there will not be any results, as there won’t be a tweet that contains ALL of those keywords.

Untitled1

Therefore, it’s important to remember that Twilert will look for only the tweets that contain every single word you enter into the search box. We recommend only using two or three at the very most. Which leads us on to….

3. Searching for multiple queries
If you want to look for different keywords and phrases all within the same Twilert, you can employ the OR search operator. For example you might want to search for “mohair socks” OR “where can I buy socks” OR “Cashmere socks”

By using the OR operator, found within the ‘filter by word’ dropdown and then ‘something OR another’ you can look for tweets that contain a much larger variety of words and phrases.

Untitled2

4. Searching by user
Twilert offers various tools which help you to filter your results by user. These can be found in the main Twilert dashboard under the ‘Filter by User’ tool, as shown in the image below.

Untitled4

We explained further in this post about the merits of each, but if you want to get started straight away, the three key aspects to remember are simply this:

To:user (e.g. to:mashable)– this will return tweets sent directly to the user @Mashable

From:user (e.g. from:Twilert) – this will return only results sent from the user Twilert (so you could pair this with a keyword from:Twilert #twittertips and find all tweets sent by that user that contains the keyword ‘#twittertips’)
Mention search (e.g. @tescomobile)– this would find all tweets that mention the user @tescomobile
5. Excluding retweets
A handy hint to know if you’re finding that your results include too many versions of the same tweet, as a retweet, is that you can use the simple -RT operator, to exclude all Retweets from your results. Add -RT anywhere in your results and you will remove the Retweets, to only leave original tweets in your results.

We hope you have found this guide helpful and if you need any help or have questions about a search you’d like to create, please do not hesitate to contact us on Twitter or [email protected]