Web Business by Ken Burbary

Mine the Gold in Social Media through Conversation Search

Google has transformed our lives with its uncanny ability to answer the question, “What is X?”.   Enter any term and Google will tell you what it is and/or how it works. If Google’s spiders can find a web page, you can find the content within it using Google Search.

Enter Social Media.

The proliferation of real-time, mass conversation online is something that Google hasn’t done as good a job at keeping up with. Opportunistic individuals have taken advantage of this fact to create specialized conversation search engines. Currently they do the best job of finding “Who is talking about what, and where”.  There are many tools online that do this. Some, like Social Mention and Samepoint scour a large portion of the social media landscape, while others like Twitter Search focus on a single social network. For purposes of this post, I’m going to focus on demonstrating how you can use advanced features Twitter Search that often get overlooked.

Much like Google search, Twitter search is very straightforward. Enter a term and it will display a results page that shows all mentions of that term, or combination of terms, that are being discussed on Twitter. You can also search by Hashtag to view all Tweets with that tag. These features are only the tip of the iceberg that Twitter Search offers. By clicking the “Advanced Search” link, you’ll see a feature-rich search page that offers.

People Search

Is ideal if you:

• Want to find all tweets from your favorite Twitter personality
• Want to find all tweets to a particular person
• Want to find all tweets mentioning a particular person

These methods of searching can be useful if you want to catch up on a particular topic between people, follow all replies directed to someone, or  monitor buzz on a specific person.

Location Search

Ever wonder who else living  or working in your city is on Twitter? Enter your location and select the distance radius. You’ll most likely find other people, in some cases extremely close, near you that you had no idea about. It’s a great way to expand your Twitter network by adding new conections that bring new and different perspectives.

This method of searching can also be useful when attending conferences or other events, and you want to search & find which other Twitter users are near you.

Date Range Search

This is a great way to find that tweet that you loved but didn’t save, or couldn’t easily find because it happened  more than a day or two ago. Often times, you’ll have a conversation with someone and need to go back and reference one of the tweets. The date range search makes it easy. The only thing you need to remember is a rough idea of when the conversation occurred.

Attitude Search

Automating sentiment analysis has not yet perfected, even with the best natural language processing technologies on the market. Despite being imperfect, there are insights that can be revealed by experimenting with searches to uncover the positive or negative tones in the key topics. Try both, you may uncover something that really surprises you.

Link Search

This is one of my favorite search options. Remember, one of the primary reasons many people tweet is to share links that interest them, or links they think will be valuable to their network. Shared link tweets are an important way to keep up on news, trending topics, and key blog posts. It’s easy to miss links though, because Twitter conversations happen quickly. And your attention span cannot scale with the noise on Twitter. It’s simply not possible, even with tools like Tweetdeck. So, this search method makes it easy to catchup on what you missed.

Enter the username of the person you want to search for link tweets from and check the “Containing Links” box. You’ll be returned their tweets that only contain links. You can then easily scan the links without having to wade through all the conversation in between them.

You can take this even further, by subscribing to the RSS feed generated for any Twitter Search query. Add the feed URL to your favorite reader, and you will have automated your search. I use this method to keep up on link tweets from key folks I follow Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang, Mack Collier, Aaron Strout and Alan Wolk.

There are surely creative people out there that have invented more sophisticated ways to search twitter conversations, and you’re EXACTLY the people I want to hear from. Please share any power search tips you have!