Twitter 101-3: Getting even more from Twitter

Let’s continue our look at more tools and tips for making Twitter your favorite social media platform. 

A short list:

Twitter can help you find useful stuff

• Probably the least-used and least-understood function on Twitter is its Advanced Search. It makes finding relevant and useful content so much easier. To locate it: After you have done a regular search on Twitter you will get a results page with the little cog icon to the right. Click on it and one of your three options will be Advanced Search. This is where you can narrow down your search with word choices (including or excluding, for example), people, places and sentiment (positive or negative, for example).

For more on Advanced Search see Using advanced search by Twitter or check out this piece from Mashable: 10 Tips and Tricks for Powerful Twitter Search

• Understand how hashtags are used and why you can both use them to be found and to find others and their relevant content. In a nutshell a hashtag is any series of letters (a word or several words typed together without spaces) preceded by the # symbol. These hashtags started on Twitter and are now common across many social media platforms. For more see How to Use Hashtags With Twitter on WikiHow.

• Perhaps you would like to start using Twitter more for business purposes. This post 12 Most Twitterific Ways to Use Twitter in Your Business by Rebekah Radice (@RebekahRadice on Twitter) has some good basic starting points on the how to use Twitter for business purposes.

• Last, but certainly not least, be sure to start sharing your Twitter @name everywhere so that people know this is one more place they can connect with you. Having it on business cards, in your email signature and on your other social media pages (such as Linkedin and Facebook) can only help more people connect with you.

So, now do you feel ready to get more from Twitter? I hope so, but if you have questions that haven’t been answered in these posts please don’t hesitate to ask … I’m on Twitter as @mikejny.

Related posts:

Twitter 101-1: Twitter – You Hardly Know Her

Twitter 101-2: Getting more from Twitter