Social media search tips

There are some great tips and tools out there for optimising your search for social media, that I wanted to share with you. I’m actually finding that I use Google less, as I focus on site-specific searches, or ways of searching that help me get to the content I want to find, quickly and more efficiently. These tips apply to both brands that want to search for what people are saying about them, and people who just want to find the most up to date and relevant information around a particular topic.

Search within who you follow on Twitter

So often I’ll remember a tweet that I saw from someone with a particular link or reference in it that I want to come back to later. Unless you saved it to your favourites or remember who it came from, then it can be pretty hard to find again. Searchtastic overcomes this with their search option that only searches your followed users. It’s a great search function that Twitter should have introduced a long time ago. Now the site isn’t exactly fast, but I love the fact that you don’t have to log in to just search through the people that you follow and the screenshot below shows you how simple and easy to view it is :

Search Twitter by location

This is something that I actually get asked quite a lot and Twitter make this available through their advanced search options (where you can find a whole host of other search tips). Just click on advanced search, enter your term, then scroll down below to select the location and the radius. One slightly annoying thing is that you don’t have the option to just select ‘Ireland’ as a location for example, but it’s still incredibly useful.

Twitter’s Boolean Search

You might be familiar with boolean search on Google, for example adding in ‘OR’ searches for either of those terms being present such as Dublin OR Ireland. This functionality is also available on Twitter, with some nice features that are specific to the site itself, such as the ‘since’ operator, which searches tweets within a certain timeframe that you set. The full list of features from Twitter is available here.

Search Foursquare by number of checkins

4sqsearch is a great search engine for Foursquare that offers some functionality not currently offered by the application itself. While I don’t necessarily think this site offers a great user experience for Foursquare itself as it occurs on a separate site, they have a great function that allows you to search locations by the number of checkins. This enables you to see which are the most popular places, or if you’re on a hunt for badges you can search the places that have the lowest amount of checkins and increase your chances!

Site search on Digg

This is a nice search function offered by Digg, that allows you to search for submitted stories just by a particular site. This is a particularly useful tool if you want to see which of your own stories have been submitted, if you run a blog or website, as well as searching through your favourite sites to see which is their most popular content. Simply search site:yoursitehere.com

Search by day on Google

This is a great search option offered by Google, that not many people know about. Enter your search then on the left hand side you’ll see an option to search by the latest content. If you click on ‘more’ you can select to only see content from the past 24 hours. Though not exactly real-time, this is a great way to see the most up to date content about your brand, or a particular area you’re interested in.

Bing Social Search

Bing’s social search option is a nice feature that shows you the latest status updates for your search term, as well as links that are being shared online, and the number of people that are sharing these. Bing are certainly focusing heavily in social search, couple with their search option within Facebook.