Employing Advanced Search Options Effectively In Various Social Media Sites

By Author: Softweb Solutions
Total Articles: 136
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Social Media search has played a decisive role in providing endless opportunities to organizations; by successfully promoting their brands online. With the help of this feature; organizations can get important information related to their market and competitors. It also helps in building networks and inspires to write engaging content. Social Media search plays a pivotal role in creating successful Social Media Marketing strategy. Let us now look at some advanced search options in various social networking sites:

• Facebook: Facebook provides three major search platforms. They are:

• People search: You can use this option to search for friends, follow Facebook recommendations, find friends by name or email address, find former or current Classmates or Co-workers, find friends Instant Message (IM), and perform Facebook search.
• Auto-complete search: It was previously displaying results from your friends. But now; this feature shows results from your extended networks i.e., friends of your friends.
• Facebook advanced ...
... search: With this feature, users can see click on “See more results” link in the Auto-complete drop-down menu to get suggestions for your keywords. You can filter the search by using either of these options:

• People
• Pages
• Groups
• Apps
• Events
• Web results
• Updates from friends
• Updates made public

Users can also opt for “Facebook Advanced Search Operator”. With the help of this option; users can search for anything using keywords. But you need to be very specific; because this option relies on exact matches. If you insert two words it will give you results having both the words. If you use keywords like: Facebook/Twitter it will give results either of Twitter or Facebook or both. Users can even use drop-down to get varied results for their keywords.

• Twitter: Twitter search focuses on real-time results. Now, with the inclusion of a Java Server called Blender, the search speed on Twitter has increased tremendously. With the help of this advanced search tool on Twitter; users can:

• Set the language of search results
• Sort search results by user name
• See Tweets from a particular location by opting “local filter”
• Include or exclude re-tweets
• Restrict those results containing links
• Adjust your query by excluding any word or force any word with exact match

But the most important search option in Twitter is the option to “Filter out links”. When you use the search option on Twitter to see real-time Tweets which contains links; chances are that you will get all the tweets because majority of tweets have links. In such a scenario; it is advisable to filter out the search results by searching for Tweets which do not have links. This option is very useful for real-time results. To filter out Tweets with link use “-filter: links” operators within the search query. The minus sign is very critical because it will enable you to see Tweets which have great quotes, opinions, reviews, and discussions.

• LinkedIn: LinkedIn has six different search sections:

• People: Users can search for people by location, (past) industry, and school. More advanced options are available for premium users.
• Updates: Users can filter updates by your connection level, updates from your immediate network, from friends of friends or from third network, and opt for different time ranges and locations.
• Jobs: Users can filter jobs by the freshness of the posting, experience required, industry etc.
• Companies: Users can filter companies by location, industry, company size, etc.
• Groups: Users can filter groups by category and language.
• Answers: Users can filter answers by categories and can even add new categories.

Users can even use “LinkedIn Search Boolean Operators” to exclude any term within a topic. For ex; blogging-coach will give results of users who are blogging but do not provide training for blogging. Whereas; if you combine the keywords “blogging and marketing”; and search for a profile you will see results, wherein the user is both a blogger and a marketing professional. You can opt to see at least one of the two keywords within the search results. This feature is similar to Facebook’s advanced search operator.

Did you enjoy reading this article? Are there are any other search options which can be integrated in these three social networking sites? Write your comments and feedback here to a social media expert now.