Finding the tweets you are looking for to write your article is easy if you know how to use the Twitter advanced search feature. Whether you only want to see tweets from a specific location or only the ones with a positive attitude, this is the ultimate guide you need as a journalist.
Here, we’ll show you two ways to refine your search to help you become more effective when looking for news sources: using the advanced search window and by writing some hidden keywords (or boolean search operators).
Option 1: Use the Twitter advanced search filter
When searching on the Twitter search engine, you can easily find the advanced search option on the right side of the screen.
After clicking on it, a new window will appear with different options to refine your search by words, accounts, filters and date. Then, you just need to fill in the appropriate blanks.
For example, if we wanted to see if Interhacktives had published any specific content for International Women’s Day, we could refine our search by filling in the word, date and account categories.
The results will show the thread we published for International Women’s Day in 2022.
Option 2: Use Twitter advanced search with key operators
There’s another way of refining our Twitter search, that allows you to be even more specific. You’ll just need to take note of the following useful keywords and characters, and insert them into the standard Twitter search bar:
- “” to search for an exact phrase
- OR to search either one or another keyword (or both)
- – to exclude one keyword from the search
- # to find a hashtag
- from: published by a specific account
- to: sent to a specific account
- @ mentioning one specific account
- near: to refine the location (a city, e.g.) from where a tweet was published
- within: to refine the area (1mi, 15km, etc.) from where a tweet was published
- since: to search since a specific date
- until: to search until a specific date
- : ) to see only tweets with a positive attitude
- : ( to see only tweets with a negative attitude
- ? to find tweets that ask a question
- filter:links to search only for tweets with links
An example of advanced search using key operators
To show you how it’s done, here we’ve decided to search for tweets about the war in Ukraine in order to find people who are living in a bunker in Kyiv for a story. That means we only want to see tweets published near Kyiv during the last couple of weeks and containing the word “bunker”.
So, we typed “bunker near:Kyiv within:5mi since:2022-03-07 until:2022-03-17” and we got some interesting refined results.
Of course, we would now need to fact-check all the tweets we think could be useful for our story. But using advanced search has already made our job so much easier!
Looking for other ways to use Twitter as a journalist? Check out our explainers ⤵️
🤳 What is Twitter for Professionals?
🔎 New Twitter features in 2022
🕺 Follow the Interhacktives on Twitter
I’m a digital-skilled journalist, interested in social issues and Human Rights. I’ve published in El País and ElNacional.cat, among others.
MA Interactive Journalism at City, University of London.