Twitter is a powerful social network to improve your brand, find content ideas, and connect with people who can help you grow your business. The best way to use Twitter in these ways is to use their advanced search. The following are some ways to use effectively the advanced search techniques on Twitter.

Use Top Tweets

To find out what’s trending in your industry, you can put in a keyword that has to do with your products or services. When you click on search, the results that come up first are the “top” tweets. These are tweets that have been favorited, retweeted, and posted by people with a high number of followers. Essentially, these are the tweets that are the most influential.

You can use this information to decide what you’d like to share with your followers. Since these are influential tweets, they have a high likelihood of being successful on your feed.

You can also use these results to create content for your website, since the stories in these tweets are so popular. Citing information you’re using is easy with the links in the tweets.

Keep an Eye on Competitors with To and From

You can keep an eye on competitors easily by using the “to:” and “from:” operators on Twitter’s search engine. These are used for mentions. When you use the “to:” operator, you will see tweets that people have sent. For example, “To: Mashable” will bring up all tweets people have sent to Mashable. When you use the “From: Mashable” you will see all tweets that Mashable has sent. The tweets are useful to find out what people are saying about a user or what a user is tweeting.

Use Sentiments for Leads

Sentiments are a great way to find people tweeting about something that makes them happy or sad. This works great when you’re trying to find leads because you can help people as they need it on Twitter. An example of using sentiment is by inputting “iPhone L” This will show you everyone who has tweeted about their iPhone with a sad emoticon. These people must have something wrong with their iPhone or just unhappy about their iPhone in some way. This technique is perfect for you if you’re in the business of selling iPhones or repairing them.

Refine Your Search with the Right Keywords

In Advanced Search, you will be able to identify words you want to search for on Twitter. The first field shows “All of these words.” You can put in as many words as you want separated by commas. This returns results with all of the words listed. The second field you can use is “This exact phrase.” When you put a phrase in this field, the results will only show you tweets in which people used that phrase. To return more results, you can use the “Any of these words” field. The “None of these words” field will show you results without the words listed. You can combine this field with some of the others, so that you can refine your results. “These hashtags” is another field where you can search for words with the # symbol before them.

Other fields you may want to consider using is the language, people and place ones. These will refine your above search criteria even more.

If after using these fields you don’t get what you want, go back and change the words or take out some of the words you’re trying to use. Sometimes having just one word can decrease the number of results you get or give you results you don’t want.

Filter User Tweets When Using Keywords

When you use keywords, you may end up looking at hundreds of tweets from the same user. If you’re uninterested in that user, you can search a keyword without generating results from that user simply by using the – symbol. For example, you want to search for “social media,” but you don’t want to see tweets from Hootsuite. You can do this by putting this into the search bar, “social media” -@hootsuite.

Use the Special Search Page

Twitter has a special search page you can use instead of the advanced search. This page is better for advanced searchers because it doesn’t guide you as much as the advanced search tool on the site. With this search page, you input exact phrases you want to search for by using quotations. For example, “content marketing” will only show you tweets with the exact phrase of content marketing. You can also use the word “or” for tweets containing one word OR another word. For example, love or hate. All tweets that come up in results will contain the word love or the word hate. There are many tricks to using the special search page effectively, which can be found on Twitter’s Query Operators page.

Save Searches

As you use the Twitter search engine, you’ll find yourself doing the same searches often. Instead of typing keywords and operators repeatedly, you can save your searches. This speeds up the process, so you can get the information you need quickly.

With these advanced search techniques for Twitter, you can find leads, check on competitors, and generate content ideas. Start using these now and then save the best searchers for later.