J-Source

A journalist’s guide to searching on Twitter

Sun Media's national community manager Monique Beech offers her advice on how to search through tweets and the multiple search options.  By Monique Beech, national community manager for Sun Media I had a request from a reporter recently asking me to help her find tweets sent out by a particular Twitter user on a specific…

Sun Media's national community manager Monique Beech offers her advice on how to search through tweets and the multiple search options. 

By Monique Beech, national community manager for Sun Media

I had a request from a reporter recently asking me to help her find tweets sent out by a particular Twitter user on a specific day. Challenge accepted.

After giving it some thought, I scoured Twitter advanced search for the answer. There are so many awesome Twitter shortcuts you can use to find specific information, enabling you to find everything from tweets sent from a particular user to specific time periods to posts with positive or negative feelings.

How we found reporter Don Peat’s tweets from July 11. ‘from:(username) until:date:

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Trouble is, I don’t think a lot of journalists know Twitter search terms exists.

Here’s a screenshot of all the wonderful ways you can find information on Twitter. Go forth and find great content, reporters and editors.

You can also use Twitter’s advanced search tool. However, it doesn’t offer you the ability to search for a particular time frame.

This post was originally published on Monique’s Morning Minute

 

Tamara Baluja is an award-winning journalist with CBC Vancouver and the 2018 Michener-Deacon fellow for journalism education. She was the associate editor for J-Source from 2013-2014.