This is the first on a series of posts about how to use Twitter Search.

We’ve talked about Twitter search quite a bit on this blog. The chance to see what people are talking about in real time has been an exciting development in the world of search.

But searching on Twitter can give you so much more depth than finding out who is using particular keywords in their Tweets. Because thanks to Twitter’s Advanced Search Interface you can start looking for mentions of a particular keyword in very specific circumstances. And these can sometimes bring up very interesting results.

The place to start is the Advanced Search Interface, which can be found here and looks like this:

As you can see from the form, you can be very specific about your search. To start with, you can specify the keyword context. Are you looking for general mentions of a keyword, or only when it is used with other keywords?

You can then take a look at who is mentioning a particular word, and who is receiving this keyword in their @ Tweets. This might be an effective way of monitoring how your competition are using Twitter: Do they get asked for lots of price quotes? Or are they dealing with lots of support requests? Does this mean that they are using Twitter more effectively than you are? What can you learn from that?

You can also just look at Tweets that have happened within a particular time frame. This might be useful for trying to find out how a particular event has been discussed at the time of the event, compared to how it is discussed now. You could also use this to look at how your competitors are changing their use of Twitter over time.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of Twitter search is that you can also search for tweets that have a particular ‘attitude’. For example, if you want to find all the Tweets that mention a particular keyword in a positive way, then the results will show all those Tweets in the time frame that use common ‘Smilies’ and other positive statements. Once again, this might be a good way of finding out how you or your competitors are being mentioned.

Finally, it’s possible to specify the location of Tweets, and set a radius of miles around which you want to find all the mentions of a particular keyword. These use the location set by each user in their profile, but mobile users already have the option of including their actual coordinates. This might be good at finding out, particularly if your business has a fixed location (such as a shop), how frequently local people are Tweeting about you.

Twitter search can also go a lot deeper, but we’ll be covering that in tomorrow’s post on ‘How to use advanced search operators on Twitter‘.

Have a go on Twitter’s Advanced Search function and see what you can find out.