If you’re only searching Twitter with a hashtag or a keyword, you’re missing out on vast reams of data that could help you improve your social media marketing and help you reach more of your target audience.

About 500 million tweets are sent out every day, or about 6,000 tweets per second. Getting insights from those tweets can help you find more of your target audience, figure out what your current customers are feeling, learning the best times to tweet for increased user engagement, and much, much more.

Learning the Twitter secrets of advanced search can help you do all that.

To find advanced search, you can either use the Twitter web app or you can go directly to twitter’s advanced search. You will get options to search by words, people, places, dates, and more, and you can fill out as many of the fields as you like to narrow your results.

For each category, you get different options. For example, when searching by words, you can search for an exact phrase, filter out certain words, or even narrow in on the language used to write the tweet.

Here are a few ways you can use advanced search, specifically, to get actionable data:

You need to know not only what the trending topics are, but also what the most popular tweets about those topics are.

That will help you understand what other people are doing to successfully engage users and get more exposure on the site.

To find this information, just amend the basic search. In the regular search box, enter the keyword and an operator like min_retweets: [number] or min_faves: [number]. You may have to toy around with the numbers to get the search results you need. For example, you might plug in a number that is too high and have to dial it back until you get the results.

Look at the results and analyze what the most popular tweets did, including the language used, the time they were posted, and the account following they already had.

Search Your Interactions

Feel like you talked to another brand about a partnership idea but can’t remember if it actually happened or you only talked about it?

Or do you feel like you remember a customer’s name from a previous interaction but aren’t sure what you talked about?

You can use advanced search to find those interactions so you have the information you need before you reach out.

Under the “people” section of the search, enter in your user name and the user name of the other person in the “from these accounts” and “to these accounts” sections. You will get a list of the tweets that were sent between the two.

You will need to reverse the order of the names in the “from” and “to” fields and search again to get the complete list of all tweets.

Get Content Ideas

Looking at what other people have written is a great what to get ideas for your own posts.

You might think of a related post, or you might find a topic in your niche that you have yet written about on your own blog.

Use the advanced search and put a general topic in the “all of these words” box and more specific information in the “this exact phrase” box. For example, you might enter in “dogs and cats” for “all of these words” and “how to” in “this exact phrase” and get back results like “how to put dogs and cats on a diet” or “how to make dogs and cats friends.” The results will bring up varied results that will give you a lot of great ideas.

Monitor Brand Mentions

Social media is a popular place for people to share their opinions about or experiences with certain brands, and it is important that you monitor those mentions so that you can control the conversation.

If someone says something negative about your brand, you want to respond publicly and positively so that you can make the situation right and win over your customers.

If someone says something positive, you want to know about that also and publicly thank them for doing so.

You can monitor your brand mentions by using the “all of these words” section of the advanced search. Put in your brand name, your twitter handle, and your website to get the most comprehensive results. Your search might look like “walmart @walmart walmart.com” for example.

Brainstorm all the ways that people might mention you so that you capture all results. For example, McDonald’s might also include “mickey d’s” in its search since that’s a popular nickname for the fast food chain.

These and other Twitter hacks will help you get more from the site, allowing you to make changes to your social media marketing strategy that will get more user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.

This article was originally posted on the CodeFuel Blog.