TweetReach Blog

This post by Union Metrics Co-Founder Jenn Deering Davis originally appeared on the KISSmetrics Blog on April 24, 2012

If you’re using social media, you should be measuring it. But don’t measure just for the sake of having metrics. Instead, measure your social activities so that you can learn what’s successful, what isn’t, and how you can improve.

In this post we will help you get started with social media measurement for your organization by addressing these questions:

• How do you know if your social media activities are effective?
• How do you decide what metrics you should be monitoring?
• How do you calculate those metrics?
• How do you interpret the numbers once you have them?

The Two Types of Social Media Measurement

The two types of social media measurement are:

1. Ongoing Analytics – Ongoing monitoring that tracks activity over time
2. Campaign-Focused Metrics – Campaign or event analytics with a clear beginning and end

Ongoing analytics are necessary for keeping up with the overall pulse of general conversation about your brand and company. Once your brand tracking is set up, you can just let it run and check in regularly to see how everything is going.

Campaign-focused metrics, on the other hand, help you understand the impact of targeted marketing initiatives and will vary from campaign to campaign, depending on your goals for each. An effective social media measurement program will likely include both ongoing and campaign-specific measurement.

Let’s Start With An Example

Let’s say you work at a large consumer products company and are about to launch a new diaper brand. To accompany the big advertising and marketing push, you want to sponsor a one-hour Twitter party where parents and caregivers can discuss raising children, focused on issues around diapering and potty training.

You’ve picked out a unique hashtag, contracted with an influential Twitterer who will pose questions and lead the conversation. You’re ready to go. But now you need to make sure you’re measuring this conversation so you can learn – and later tell your boss – how effective the chat was.

Step 1: Determine Your Social Goals

Before you jump into measuring every single tweet, photo and Facebook comment posted about your brand, first think about your goals with social media. What are you trying to accomplish or gain through these social channels? And which channels are most relevant to those goals?

The first step in your measurement plan should be to generate a list of what you’re trying to achieve from your social media efforts. Social media can serve a variety of purposes, from broadcasting news and information, to answering customer questions and engaging with a community. What is your company trying to accomplish?

You’ve probably already started interacting on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram, depending on the type of information and the format of the content you’re sharing. You’ve probably also considered the audience you want to reach and the tools they’re using. So the next step is to think about what you want your audience to do with your content on these channels. Are you trying to get them to read, share, reply, click, purchase, engage? List out all your business goals for social media.

For our Twitter chat example, our goals are probably two-fold:

1. First, we want to spread awareness of the new product to potential customers
2. Second, we want to get to know the parenting community on Twitter, particularly the influencers in that community

Step 2: Create Metrics To Measure These Goals

The next step is to match your goals to actual metrics and behaviors you can measure. For example, if you’re trying to measure engagement, then what is the practical form of engagement you want to track? Is it retweets or reposts? Replies or comments? Clicks? Here are a few suggestions of behaviors to measure, based on a few common social media goals…

• If you want to measure awareness, then use metrics like volume, reach, exposure, and amplification. How far is your message spreading?
• If you want to measure engagement, then look for metrics around retweets, comments, replies, and participants. How many people are participating, how often are they participating, and in what forms are they participating?
• If your goal is to drive traffic to your website, then track URL shares, clicks and conversions. Are people moving through social media to your external site and what do they do once they’re on your site?
• If your goal is to find advocates and fans, then track contributors and influence. Who is participating and what kind of impact do they have?
• If your goal is to increase your brand’s share of voice, then track your volume relative to your closest competitors. How much of the overall conversation around your industry or product category is about your brand?

For our hypothetical Twitter chat, our first goal is awareness, so we want to measure:

1. The tweet volume and reach of our Twitter chat
2. How many unique people tweeted with our hashtag

We’re also interesting in getting to know this community, so we want to know more about the participants, including:

3. Any influence metrics we can find (like follower counts and Klout scores)
4. Relevant demographic information about them (gender, location, etc…)

Step 3: Measure

After you’ve listed the metrics you want to focus on, now you need to find tools that actually capture these metrics, and then start measuring. In some cases, social media channels themselves provide some form of analytics, in some cases you will need to use third party tools, and in some cases you can build your own using APIs.

If you’re not sure which tools to use for which channels, ask around or do a quick Google search and you’ll find tons of options. SocDir is a useful and comprehensive source with a list of more than 300 social media metrics tools.

Many social analytics tools work in real-time, so if you can plan ahead and set up tracking before your campaign begins (and well before your report is due), it will be much easier to access the data you need later.

On Twitter, for example, accessing tweets that are more than a few days old is very expensive, difficult, and far less reliable than collecting and archiving them in real time. When possible, set up your measurement tools before your campaign begins.

The measurement part of this may take some time, so let the tools do their work. Make sure they’re tracking the social posts you’re interested in, do what you can to filter out spam, and then come back in a few days for steps 4 and 5.

Step 4: Monitor And Report

The fourth step is to report your results. Use your initial findings to set a baseline or benchmark for future measurement, and share these early figures with your important stakeholders. Two important questions to nail down are:

• How do your numbers compare to what you expected?
• How do they compare to your competitors’ or related products and campaigns?

One of the great parts of social media analytics is that you can easily run reports about your competitors to see how they’re doing.

This is a also a good time to consider your schedule for regular reporting. Depending on your (and your organization’s) schedule, monthly or quarterly reporting may work best, but weekly reporting may work well for others. No matter the schedule, make sure you’re checking in regularly on your metrics. Don’t let your effort up to this point go to waste! And let your metrics accumulate over time; you’ll see how valuable this data will become after a few months have passed and you have older data to compare to your new data.

In your reports, be sure you highlight the important numbers:

• Include benchmarks or other contextual information so that your stakeholders can quickly understand what all the figures mean
• Consider including visualizations of your data; graphs can help communicate your results quickly and clearly to your audience
• Keep your graphs simple and clean

If you’re interested in reading more about data visualization, I highly recommend the work of Stephen Few; he has some excellent tips and examples.

Going back to our Twitter chat example, we’ll want to prepare a brief report to share internally. We don’t have baseline metrics yet to compare these to, but we probably started with a general idea of what we wanted to achieve with the chat.

As you recall, our goals were increasing awareness of the new product and getting to know community influencers for future interactions. Let’s say our chat generated 750 tweets from 200 unique contributors and a reach of 500,000. Several participants had Klout scores over 60 and tweeted multiple times.

So, even though this was our first chat, these are very respectable initial numbers. Half a million Twitter accounts were exposed to tweets with our hashtag, and we now have a list of 200 people who were talking about diapers, some of them very influential. We can build on this foundation in future initiatives, nurture relationships with these participants and continue to increase awareness of our new product.

Step 5: Adjust And Repeat

The final step is to carefully review your measurement program. How are these metrics doing? Are you missing anything? Was anything superfluous or unnecessary? Figure out what you can improve, make changes, and then measure some more. Check back in with the goals you set initially and make sure your new metrics actually help you address those goals.

In the case of our Twitter chat, we now realize that we also want to measure engagement around our chat hashtag. We’ve decided it’s important to know how many of our host’s tweets were retweeted and replied to, so we can understand what participants found most interesting. We can add this in and include it in our reporting next time.

If you’re participating in social media, you really need to understand how you’re doing. Is your content having the impact you want? Are you meeting your company’s goals with social media? This is why monitoring and measuring your social media activities is so crucial – you need reliable and consistent analytics that help you track your success on channels like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

This post by Union Metrics Co-Founder Jenn Deering Davis originally appeared on the KISSmetrics Blog on April 2, 2012.

So your company is now officially participating in social media. You’ve set up a Twitter account, a Facebook page, even a few Pinterest boards. You respond to customer questions, follow fans, post important news, and thank your advocates for their support.

Beyond that, what are you doing to track and monitor these social interactions? If you’re engaging in social media, then you should be measuring those activities. How else will you know how you’re doing? The good news is it’s easier than you think to measure your social media efforts.

Here are five simple, but oh-so-useful social media metrics you should be measuring right now.

1. Volume

The first – and easiest – social media metric to measure is volume. What is the size of the conversation about your brand or your campaign? Volume is a great initial indicator of interest. People tend to talk about things they either love or hate, but they rarely talk about things they simply don’t care about at all.

While volume can seem like a simple counting metric, there’s more to it than just counting tweets and wall posts. It’s important to measure the number of messages about your brand, as well as the number of people talking about your brand, and track how both of those numbers change over time. For example, Facebook Insights has a useful metric (cleverly called “people talking about this”) that measures how many unique people have posted something to their walls about your brand page.

Learn when volume is higher – are there days or times when more people seem to be talking about your brand? You can use this information to focus more of your own posts during these times to get more engagement, which we’ll talk about in a minute.

2. Reach

Reach measures the spread of a social media conversation. On its own, reach can help you understand the context for your content. How far is your content disseminating and how big is the audience for your message? Reach is a measure of potential audience size.

And of course, a large audience is good, but reach alone does not tell you everything. Reach becomes very powerful when compared to other engagement metrics. Use reach as the denominator in your social media measurement equations.

Pick important action or engagement numbers like clicks, retweets, or replies (more on this in a second) and divide them by reach to calculate an engagement percentage. Of the possible audience for your campaign, how many people participated? Reach helps contextualize other engagement metrics.

3. Engagement

Speaking of engagement metrics, this is one of the most important areas to measure in social media. How are people participating in the conversation about your brand? What are they doing to spread your content and engage with the topic?

In most social media settings, content can be both shared and replied to. Twitter retweets (RTs) and Facebook shares and posts are helpful to know who is spreading your content, while comments, replies and likes are helpful to see who is replying to your content. Think carefully about your goals with social media. Are you focused more on generating interaction (replies, comments) or on spreading a message (retweets and posts)? Be sure you’re using metrics that reflect what’s important to your brand right now.

And are there types of content that generate engagement? Start paying attention to what messages generate the most replies and RTs. It might surprise you what people interact with; it’s not always what you expect.

4. Influence

Who is talking about your brand and what kind of impact do they have? Influence is probably the most controversial social media metric; there are myriad tools that measure social influence, and they all do it in different ways. But one thing they all agree on is that audience size does not necessarily relate to influence. Just because someone has a lot of friends or followers, that does not mean they can encourage those followers to actually do anything.

Based on past actions, we can make assumptions about how influential someone might be in the future. This type of potential influence is useful to decide who to reach out to when you’re preparing for a campaign. Tools like Klout and PeerIndex assign people an influence score. Tools like these measure online social capital and the (potential) ability to influence others.

Kinetic influence, on the other hand, will help you understand who is participating in and driving conversation about your brand and your campaigns, and who gets others to participate in these specific conversations. You can find your brand advocates by focusing on people whose messages are amplified by others, and not just who has the most followers.

5. Share of Voice

Finally, to really understand how well you’re doing on social media, you should consider a share of voice metric. How does the conversation about your brand compare to conversations about your competitors? Determine what percentage of the overall conversation about your industry is focused on your brand compared to your main competitors. And learn from your competitors’ successes; since so many of these social media conversations are public, you can measure your competitors’ impact just as easily as you can measure your own.

Consistency and preparation are essential to effective social media measurement. Pick your favorite metrics and start tracking them now. Use the same formulas and tools to calculate these numbers every week or month. Track your numbers over time and pay attention to how they change. If you see anything that looks higher or lower than what you typically expect, investigate it. By measuring – and paying attention to – these five social media metrics, you’ll be able to better understand the impact and effectiveness of your social media activity.

Ever wondered what kinds of Twitter analytics you get with TweetReach Pro? The cornerstone of a TweetReach Pro account is the Tracker, our real-time measurement tool that provides comprehensive tracking, analysis, and archival of all tweets about your topic – whether it’s an event, campaign, brand, client, hashtag, Twitter handle, or anything else you can think of.

Here’s a brief overview of the Tracker and some of its features.

Each Tracker can monitor unlimited tweets for unlimited time about any topic. You can include up to 15 distinct search terms in your Tracker to be sure you’re finding all tweets about your topic. In addition to overall summary metrics like reach, exposure, tweet volume and number of unique contributors, each Tracker provides detailed information about tweets and retweets, hashtags, URLs, contributor participation and influence, and much more.

Trackers are available with a TweetReach Pro account.

We recently upgraded the contributor metrics available in our TweetReach Pro Trackers. Among other metrics we’re now surfacing are new contributor amplification measures, including amplified impressions and an amplification multiplier.

Our objective with these new contributor metrics is to help you find people who are driving conversation and engagement around your campaign or brand. Because, depending on your goals, there probably isn’t one single influence metric that completely captures the contributions of your most important, active participants. So we present you with several contributor metrics:

• Tweets
• Direct Impressions
• Retweets
• Retweet Rate
• Total Exposure
• Amplification Multiplier

RT rate is the average number of retweets per tweet a contributor has posted. This metric is useful for finding people who have contributed to the spread of a message and who have engaged followers. Look at this number in relation to the total number of tweets this contributor has posted.

The amplification multiplier represents the spread of a tweet through retweets. If the original tweet generated 100 direct impressions, and retweets generated 150 additional impressions, then that tweet generated 250 total impressions, resulting in an amplification multiplier of 1.5x the original tweet. For each contributor, this number is calculated as an average for all their tweets in this Tracker. If a participant did not receive any retweets, then that person will not have an amplification multiplier, since her tweets were not amplified. Generally, anyone with an amplification multiplier of 1.2x or higher is doing quite well at spreading conversation. And sometimes you’ll see someone with a huge amplification multiplier – 100x or more. Generally, this person did not generate many direct impressions, but was retweeted by someone with a large following. If a number looks like an outlier, it probably is, so check that person’s other metrics to see what’s causing this spike.

To find influential people in your Tracker, take a look at all of these contributor metrics. Use tweets to find your most active advocates. Use direct impressions to find people with a lot of followers. Use RT rate to find people with an active, engaged following. Use the amplification multiplier to find people with a large secondary audience. Together, you should be able to develop a list of engaged, influential and passionate advocates for your campaign or brand.

You can also drill in to view an individual contributor’s details by clicking on their username anywhere in your Tracker. On the contributor detail page, you’ll find all kinds of information about that Twitter user, as seen here:

As you may know, we recently launched our new free TweetReach accounts. Since then, a few people have asked us about the difference between our free TweetReach accounts and our paid TweetReach Pro subscriptions. Here’s a quick primer, but there’s more on our helpdesk and we’re around if you have any questions.

A free TweetReach account comes with unlimited quick reports with our basic metrics, a My Reports archive, PDF and Excel report downloads. Quick reports will include the 50 most recent tweets from the past week.

A TweetReach Pro subscription, which starts at $84 per month, includes unlimited real-time tweet tracking, detailed and comprehensive metrics, full CSV data export, and more pro-level features. The biggest difference between a free account and a Pro subscription is access to our Tracker, which is only available through TweetReach Pro. The Tracker is our real-time tweet measurement tool, which can analyze and archive all tweets about a topic – with no limits on time or number of tweets.

Here’s an overview of the features included in a free account and TweetReach Pro:

A free TweetReach account is perfect for anyone trying our tools for the first time, casual users, personal accounts, small business or consultants with a small social media budget. TweetReach Pro is our professional analytics package, good for companies tracking their earned media conversations, public relations and marketing agencies, social media experts running campaigns for clients, or anyone who needs in-depth and comprehensive metrics.

Of course, you don’t need an account at all to use TweetReach. There’s no signup or commitment required to run quick reports at any time. You only need to sign up if you want to save your reports or download them to PDF and CSV.

There’s one question our support team gets asked more often than anything else – how far back can TweetReach reports go? And it’s no wonder we get this question all the time; it can be pretty damn confusing. How long are tweets available? Why aren’t they available for a week or more? Why does this seem to change from one day to the next?

First, a bit about how TweetReach reports work. Our snapshot reports – both the 50-tweet free report and the full $20 report – are generated from Twitter’s Search API. You type in a search query, which can consist of one or more hashtags, keywords, usernames, URLs, and so on, and then we run that search through Twitter’s Search API to find all matching tweets. So our snapshot reports are dependent upon the tweets accessible through Twitter’s Search API.

It probably goes without saying that Twitter handles a lot of data. A lot. Twitter currently processes around 200 million new tweets a day, resulting in more than 350 billion tweet deliveries every single day. By our (very rough) estimation, there have been something like 1.75 trillion unique tweets posted in the past 2.5 years. Without getting too technical, let’s just say that it’s pretty hard to keep a service of this magnitude running. Because of this scale, Twitter can’t possibly keep trillions of historical tweets accessible to anyone at any time. Which is why when you go to Twitter Search or run a TweetReach report, you’re probably only going to find a few days worth of tweets. It’s just too hard to keep any more reliably and consistently available.

One of the things we love about Twitter – or at least that we have long since learned to live with – is that it can be a bit unpredictable. It’s a huge application with hundreds of millions of accounts; there will be occasional fail whales and things are probably going to change from one day to the next. One thing we know for sure is that it will continue to get harder and harder for Twitter to make older tweets available through search. The good news is that we’ve been doing this for a long time and have a number of ways to deal with these inevitable changes.

• Every day at TweetReach, we look at hundreds of reports to understand how far back search is going on that day, and we post current search conditions on our helpdesk so you can always be up-to-date.
• We are experts at constructing search queries so we can get the most and best possible data from Twitter.
• We built our Tracker to monitor and archive your tweets so that you don’t lose them after a few days.
• We’re here to help you figure out how to find the tweets you need. When in doubt about a search or a report, ask us!

This brings us back to the most frequently asked of our FAQs – how far back can a TweetReach report go? The simplest answer is that our one-time snapshot reports – both the free and the full $20 versions – go back as far as Twitter’s Search API does. And right now, the Twitter Search API goes back a few days (the exact number varies, so check here for current conditions). The more in-depth answer is that, if we know about your event, campaign, or promotion in advance, we can use our TweetReach Pro service to track and save your tweets for weeks, months or even years. TweetReach Pro comes with Trackers, which connect to Twitter’s real-time Streaming API instead of their historical Search API. This means we can actually save your tweets on our own servers the moment they’re posted to Twitter, and then you can access them later because we’re not dependent on Twitter keeping those tweets available.

So, if you’re confused about your search results or curious about what tweets you can retroactively access, let us help you. Seriously, we’re here if you have any questions – just ask!

Photo credit: Search. by Jeffrey Beall

We often get asked about reach. How is reach calculated? Why reach? How can you really know how many people were reached? These are great questions and a big part of our business – we even named our product after it! At TweetReach, we think reach is one of the most important, but also one of the most misunderstood, metrics in social media. Our reach metric calculates the size of the potential audience for a message and this metric is an essential measure for any earned media campaign.

How TweetReach calculates reach

First, let’s talk a little bit about what we mean by “reach” and specifically how we calculate reach at TweetReach.

Typically, reach refers to the capacity or range of something. In the case of earned and social media, reach is the size of the potential audience for a message. What is the maximum number of people who could have been exposed to a message? In newspapers and magazines, reach is measured through circulation numbers. In television, we use Nielsen ratings to understand a TV program’s reach. For social media, we have TweetReach.

So when you run a TweetReach report, the reach number in your report reflects the size of the Twitter audience for your search query. Our reach number is a count of the unique Twitter accounts that received a tweet about your topic. It’s an actual computation of unique Twitter IDs, with duplicate recipients removed. Our reach metric is not an approximation or estimated ballpark figure, nor is it total impressions or exposure; it’s the real size of the potential audience.

Why reach matters

So, why go through all the trouble of calculating reach? Why does it matter? Because reach helps you understand the full impact of your tweets. Reach provides context for other engagement metrics. Reach quantifies the size of your message’s universe and helps you understand if your campaign is successful.

Think of reach as the denominator in your measurement equations. Use reach with action or engagement numbers like clicks, retweets, or replies to calculate an engagement percentage. Of the possible audience for your campaign, how many people participated? Reach helps contextualize other engagement metrics.

Other reach resources

Obviously, this is something we think about a lot. If you’d like to hear more, we have a few ideas about how you should use reach to contextualize and interpret your campaign’s success. We’ve also written about the relationship between reach and overall impressions. Finally, here’s more detail about how we calculate reach, exposure and other metrics. So, what’s your TweetReach?

One of the best ways to measure engagement on Twitter is by understanding how your tweets (and tweets about you) are retweeted. There’s a lot more to it than just how many retweets you’re getting or what day and time you get the most retweets. You might also want to investigate:

• Repeat retweeters. Who are your top retweeters? Who retweets you most often? These frequent retweeters are likely your biggest advocates – how can you reward and engage them better?
• High exposure retweets. What tweets reach the most people and generate the most impressions? Sometimes just one retweet can result in a very large amplification. Do you know when that happens?
• High influence retweets. Which tweets are retweeted by influencers? Influence isn’t just about who has the biggest following, but also about who can make an actual impact. Klout is one good way to measure influence, but there are many others.
• New retweeters. Has someone recently retweeted you for the first time? This could be great opportunity to start a conversation or learn more about how someone learned about you. Engage with new retweeters.

An interesting note about retweets – did you know that Twitter will only show you up to 100 retweets per tweet? If you’re getting more retweets than that, there’s no way to find out how many – and who they’re from – from Twitter.com. You could be missing retweets!

Let’s look at an example tweet. This tweet was originally sent to 2,173 followers, and after retweets it resulted in more than 22,000 impressions.

This tweet was retweeted 6 times. Now depending on your particular benchmarks, 6 retweets might not seem like very many, but in this case these few retweets generated an additional 20,000 impressions, thanks in part to contributions from @rickoshea and @iia. That’s nice amplification! Plus, @pkellypr has an impressive Klout score of 56.

Truly understanding your impact on Twitter requires more than simple quantitative measures like the number of retweets of your tweets or the number of followers you have. There’s a wealth of informative and actionable data just waiting to be explored. Try digging a little deeper into how and by whom your tweets are retweeted.

If you’re tracking tweets with a TweetReach Tracker, then you can quickly and easily get answers to all these questions about retweets. We have tons of data about each tweet, retweet, and contributor who mentions your brand on Twitter. And we can track all your retweets, no matter how many there are. There’s a short demo of the Tracker here, and we’re happy to answer any questions you might have.

Hosting a Twitter chat or Twitter party? TweetReach is a great way to:

• Track chat participation
• Measure reach
• Generate transcripts
• Determine most retweeted and highest exposure tweets

Our one-time reports are perfect for smaller Twitter chats. For $20, you’ll receive a PDF report of all tweets that include your hashtag, along with a set of summary metrics – the chat’s overall reach, total impressions generated, tweet volume, number of contributors and more. These one-time reports are limited to the most recent 1,500 tweets in the past five days.

If you host a weekly chat or are expecting a high volume of participation, try TweetReach Pro. Our Pro accounts include the TweetReach Tracker (pictured), which will monitor all tweets about your hashtag over time, with no limits on the number of tweets or the length of time. With the Tracker, you’ll have access to myriad in-depth metrics, including reach, volume, contributor influence and so much more. You’ll be able to compare trends over time, print PDF reports, and export your data to Excel.

Give it a try – run a quick report for free to see the most recent 50 tweets about a hashtag.

Twitter supports a number of advanced search operators and filters that allow you to customize your search query and find exactly the tweets you’re looking for. Here are a few of our favorite Twitter search operators and how to use them (with tons of examples).

Find one keyword OR another

First, Twitter does not require an AND or + operator to search for multiple keywords. So don’t include them. Just type together multiple keywords into your query and Twitter will return tweets that include of those terms. For example:

social media metrics

However, sometimes you might want to find tweets that include one keyword or another keyword. Use the OR operator to separate those terms and your report will include tweets that mention one or the other.

metrics OR analytics

You can also chain together multiple keywords to create a more complex query. The OR operator will attach to the word that immediately precedes it, very much like order of operations in algebra. For example, the following query will find tweets that mention social media metrics or social media analytics, because the OR links to the metrics and analytics terms.

social media metrics OR analytics

@Username queries

There are several ways to learn more about the reach of tweets from a particular Twitter account, depending on the type of information you’re looking for.

1. Tweets to, from and about an account - tweetreachapp
   Run a report for a username but do not include the @symbol.  This will return all mentions of that Twitter account (including retweets and replies), as well as all tweets from that Twitter account. This is the most comprehensive set of reach stats for a specific Twitter account.
2. Tweets to and about an account – @tweetreachapp
   Run a report for a username and include the @symbol. This will return all mentions of an account, but not any tweets from that account. This report will let you know how many people are talking about a certain Twitter account, and the ways they’re talking about it (including all retweets, replies, and mentions).
3. Tweets to an account – to:tweetreachapp
   Run a report using the to: operator and a username. Do not use the @ symbol. This report will return only direct replies to that account (where the username is the first word in the tweet). This reports is useful for learning more about how people talk to that account.
4. Tweets from an account – from:tweetreachapp
   Run a report using the from: operator and a username. Do not use the @ symbol. This report will return only tweets from that account. This reports is useful for measuring the reach of an individual Twitter account, and for learning more about the kinds of tweets that account is posting.

Date filters

You can filter your search results to a particular time period by adding the since: and until: operators to your search query. Use these date filters to narrow down your results. And since you can access up to 1500 tweets per query, if you run a report for each day of a campaign using date filters, you can find more total tweets.

social media since:2011-09-24

@mashable until:2011-09-26

You can use one or both filters in a query. These dates correspond to around 12:00 a.m. UTC, so since filter dates will include tweets from that date, but until filter dates will include tweets up until that date. And no matter what, snapshot reports can only go back about a week, so you still can’t use these filters to access tweets older than a week.

Exclusions

You can exclude certain keywords from your search by adding a minus sign (-) before the keyword. This will filter out all tweets that include that keyword. This is particularly useful if your company/brand/client/product has has a common name and want to exclude mentions of others with that name.

hilton -paris

And more…

These are some of our favorite filters and operators, but here’s the full list of advanced search operators if you’re interested in more. One word of advice – Twitter handles fairly simple queries really well, but tends to break with longer and more complex queries. We recommend that you only add in a few advanced operators per query and try to limit the total number of keywords and characters in a search query. Keep it under 5-8 words and 60 characters and you should be fine. And definitely run free TweetReach reports to test out your more complex queries and see what kinds of tweets they find.

If you ever have any questions about search queries and how to get exactly the data you need from Twitter, just ask us! We’re big Twitter search nerds and can help you figure out even the trickiest search queries.