“Advanced social media search” is a guest post by David Ritchie who is interested in Mac encryption utilities.

Being up to date with everything that happens around you and throughout the world is within reach thanks to the social media search. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn provide you with comprehensive tools to perform advanced searches and learn more about the trending topics.

Twitter grew very popular the moment people began to perceive it as the best instrument to search for real time results and it is now regarded as one of the platforms with a lot of room for innovation. When it comes to the actual search, you can use Twitter to filter results by name and to set the language for them, set local filers and even include or exclude retweets.

Easy to use as they are, these popular instruments are not enough for advanced users who want to optimize their experience to such degree that it will make real Twitter conversations silky smooth. The way to achieve this, is by searching for tweets and displaying only the ones that don’t contain links, as an effective selection process. By using the –filter:links operator you will be able to filter out all the updates that revolve around the same URL and to find quotes, reviews and interesting conversations.

Few platforms can compete with Facebook when it comes to communication and social media, as it allows you to search for people, has and auto-complete search and even an advanced search. The first is self explanatory, the auto-complete displays the results from your friends while the latter allows you to see more results following the auto-complete search. In order to filter results, you have to do it by type, choosing between people, pages, groups and more.

There are certain limitations about the Facebook search, as it is unpredictable due to the way it works, relying mostly on the network of friends. What you are looking for is not always what you get, and although you might stumble across some interesting results, it is not exactly the most precise searching method. Unlike Twitter, you can’t exclude a word or include other in your search and you are not allowed to filter results by location, hence limiting the freedom.

Last but not least, LinkedIn is providing some solutions related to search that are unavailable in either Twitter or Facebook. The search can be targeted on one of the six sections, including answers, companies, jobs, people, groups and updates. When you search for people you can filter results by location, relationship or industry and you will get even more options when you sign up for a premium account.

The same goes for the updates with the search providing you with the opportunity to filter the results by connection level, while the jobs results can be filtered by experience required, date posted etc. You can push things even further, by excluding one term or combining two search terms within one search or even choose to see one of the terms within the displayed results. The search is very effective thanks to the numerous filters that can be applied and if you do a little research and learn how to use them effectively, the results will meet your expectations.