The Twitter Book

Chapter 2. Listen In

Twitter gives you two superhero strengths everyone wants: the power to read people's thoughts and the ability to overhear conversations as if you were a fly on the wall.

To get those bionic senses, you need the right tools and a few search skills. In this chapter, we give you a guided tour of essential listening on Twitter—the who, what, where, why and how.

Use Twitter Search

Because people twitter about the things they do, encounter, read and think, the site has been described as a sentiment machine. Truly, it's a goldmine of ideas, feelings and conversations.

To become a fly on the wall, head to Twitter's search feature, which lives on its own page: http://search.twitter.com. Here you can see that a search for the phrase "organic food" brings up a slew of results with people discussing articles about the topic.

As people post to Twitter, their messages get added to the search site in real time. Twitter lets you know fresh updates are available by posting a little message at the top of your results screen, complete with a Refresh link.

twitter tip

You can make Twitter search much more powerful by using a few simple search tricks. To search for a phrase, put quotes around it, as we do here. To remove a search term, put the minus sign (−) in front of it. To search for either of two terms, put the word "or" between them.