In my recent post Beyond Searching: 3 ways to find conversations on Twitter I talked about using the Twitter advanced search, and other tools, to locate people who were referencing your work, cause or organisation. Here are some more Twitter searching titbits that could help you discover what’s going on beyond your Mentions.

Looking for a URL

All Twitter gives some excellent advice for finding whether a page on your website, a blog post or even a photo is being tweeted and retweeted on Twitter. This is great for discovering how widely your carefully-crafted content is being shared, and frees you from the limitations of seeing only those sharers who’ve Mentioned you in their tweet.

Read all the in-depth instructions, here.

Use Operators

For the Booleans among us, Twitter has published a full list of the search operators that you can use to make your searches more precise, targeted and powerful. You can find the list of search twiddles, here.

This is useful not only for searching on Twitter itself, but means that you can use the power of the advanced search in dashboard programs such as HootSuite and TweetDeck.

Plunder the past

Searching on Twitter itself is all very well, but it does only show you the last week or so of tweets. If you want to look further back than that, then you could try Snapbird.

Snapbird allows you to search for particular hashtags your own timeline, sent tweets or mentions, or those of someone else, in blocks of 1000 tweets. This could be very handy if you’ve lost sight of a particular tweet from your timeline and need to find it, pronto.

Finally, if you want to really understand how the Twitter search works – and how human beings play their part in it – read all about it in this fantastically geeky post from the Twitter engineers (thanks to The Wall Blog and All Twitter for this link).

What tips have you got for searching for conversations on Twitter?