How to Search Twitter Mentions

Keeping track of who's talking about you on Twitter is more than just navigating notifications - it's a critical part of building and protecting your brand. If used properly, this feature can help capture customer service opportunities, gather important feedback, and strengthen relationships with the community. This guide breaks down exactly how to find every mention of your brand, your name, or your products on X (formerly Twitter), from simple built-in features to powerful search commands.

Why Tracking Twitter Mentions is a Game-Changer

Monitoring your mentions goes far beyond seeing who tags your @username. When you actively look for conversations about your brand, you unlock a wealth of insights that can directly impact your bottom line. It’s an essential practice for staying connected to your audience's pulse and turning passive mentions into active relationships.

Uncover Customer Service Opportunities

Not every customer who needs help will remember to tag your official account. They might misspell your handle or simply complain into the void. By searching for your brand name, you can find people who are struggling with a product or confused about a service and step in to help. Turning a negative experience into a positive one with proactive support is one of the most powerful ways to build loyalty.

Example in Action:

A customer tweets, "My new headphones from AudioTech keep disconnecting. So frustrating!" They didn't tag @AudioTechSupport. By searching for "AudioTech headphones," the support team can find this tweet and reply, "So sorry to hear that! We can help. Can you DM us the model number so we can troubleshoot?" This proactive engagement resolves the issue and shows other potential customers that AudioTech cares.

Manage Your Brand Reputation

What are people saying when they think you're not listening? Searching for untagged mentions gives you an unfiltered look at public perception. You can catch negative feedback before it gains momentum, address misinformation, and thank customers who are praising your products organically. This is your chance to manage the narrative around your brand, rather than just reacting to it.

Discover User-Generated Content (UGC)

Your happiest customers are often your best marketers. They share photos of your products, post rave reviews, and recommend you to their friends without any prompting. Searching for your brand name helps you find this authentic content goldmine. Always make sure to get their permission before resharing user content. This content serves as powerful social proof that builds trust with potential customers far more effectively than traditional advertising.

Find New Leads and Sales Opportunities

People often turn to Twitter for recommendations. They'll tweet things like, "Does anyone know a good social media management tool?" or "Looking for an alternative to [Your Competitor]." By setting up saved searches for these types of phrases, your team can jump into relevant conversations, offer genuine help, and present your product as the perfect solution without being overly salesy.

Starting Simple: How to Find Your Direct @Mentions

Let's start with the most straightforward method. When someone directly tags your username (e.g., @YourBrand), Twitter makes it very easy to find. This is where most people begin and end their search, and it’s a necessary first step.

This works the same whether you're on a desktop or the mobile app:

1. Navigate to your account on X (Twitter).
2. Look for the notification bell icon. On desktop, it’s in the left-hand menu. On mobile, it’s in the bottom navigation bar.
3. Click or tap on the bell icon to open your Notifications tab.
4. At the top of the Notifications screen, you can filter by "All," "Verified," or "Mentions." Select Mentions.

This feed shows you a clean, chronological list of every tweet where your @username was used. It's great for quick replies and acknowledging people who have made the effort to tag you directly.

The limitation, however, is significant. This method misses everything else: misspellings of your username, conversations that only include your brand name, and discussions about your products without tagging you. To find those, you need to use the search bar.

Beyond the Basics: Mastering Twitter's Advanced Search

The real power of monitoring lies in the search bar. By using specific words and symbols, called "operators," you can tell Twitter exactly what you're looking for, filtering out all the noise. This is how you find the untagged mentions that are pure gold for your brand.

Finding Untagged Mentions of Your Brand

Untagged brand mentions are conversations where people use your company or product name but don’t include the “@” handle. To find these, you need to perform a precise text search.

Start by putting your brand name in quotes to search for the exact phrase. If your brand is "Solo Coffee," searching for "Solo Coffee" will return tweets containing that exact phrase, rather than tweets that just have the words "solo" and "coffee" somewhere in them.

Next, you’ll want to filter out your own posts. You can do this by adding -from:YourUsername to the search. This tells Twitter to show you results from everyone except you.

The final search query looks like this:

"Your Brand Name" -from:YourUsername

Combining Keywords for Specific Insights

Once you’ve mastered the basic search, you can start combining keywords to get more specific. This is where you can find customer queries, sales opportunities, and track brand sentiment.

• For Customer Support: Combine your brand name with question-related words. This helps you find people who are looking for help or are confused about something. "Your Brand Name" (help OR question OR issue OR broken) ?
• For Positive Sentiment: Look for your brand name alongside positive keywords. This is an efficient way to find happy customers and UGC. "Your Brand Name" (love OR amazing OR "best thing ever")
• For Negative Sentiment: Do the opposite to find unhappy customers and potential reputation issues before they escalate. "Your Brand Name" (sucks OR terrible OR frustrated OR broken)
• For Sales Leads: Search for mentions of your competitors alongside words like "alternative" or "recommendation." ("Competitor A" OR "Competitor B") (alternative OR switch OR better)

Filtering by Date, Language, and Links

Search operators also let you narrow your search based on time, location, or content type. This is especially useful for campaign tracking or market research.

Filter by Date Range

If you want to see mentions from a specific period (like during a product launch or marketing campaign), you can use the since: and until: operators. The format must be YYYY-MM-DD.

For example, to find mentions of an event called "Innovate Summit" that happened during the second week of May 2024, you would search:

"Innovate Summit" since:2024-05-06 until:2024-05-13

Search for Links to Your Website

Want to see who is sharing your latest blog post or linking to your homepage? The url: operator lets you search for tweets that contain a link to a specific domain or page. This helps you track content amplification and see how people are framing your content when they share it.

url:yourwebsite.com -from:YourUsername

Filter by Language

If your brand has an international audience, you can filter conversations by language to better organize your responses. Just add the lang: operator with a two-letter language code.

"Your Brand Name" lang:es

The Easy Way: Using Twitter's Built-in Advanced Search Form

Remembering all these search operators can feel overwhelming. Luckily, Twitter has a hidden page that does all the work for you: the Advanced Search form.

You can find it at: twitter.com/search-advanced

This page provides a user-friendly form with fields that correspond to all the operators we just discussed. Instead of typing them manually, you just fill in the blanks.

Key fields in the Advanced Search form include:

• Words:
  • All of these words: The same as searching for terms side-by-side.
  • This exact phrase: The same as putting a search term in "quotes."
  • Any of these words: The same as using the OR operator.
  • None of these words: The same as using the minus (-) operator to exclude words.
• People:
  • From these accounts: Your search will only show tweets from the users you list here.
  • To these accounts: Show replies sent to specific users.
  • Mentioning these accounts: Search for tweets mentioning specific @usernames.
• Dates:
  • Lets you set a "From" and "To" date, just like the `since:` and `until:` operators.

The Advanced Search page is an excellent tool for building complex queries without needing to memorize the syntax. Once you run a search from this page, Twitter generates the query in the search bar. You can then copy it, modify it, or save it for later.

Automate Your Monitoring: How to Save Your Searches

Once you’ve created a powerful search query that brings you valuable results, you don’t want to type it in every single day. By saving your search, you can turn it into a dedicated, updating feed that you can check at any time.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Perform any search on Twitter using the regular search bar or the Advanced Search page.
2. On the results page, look for the three dots (...) icon next to the search bar at the top of the screen.
3. Click the three dots and select "Save search."

And that’s it! Your saved search will now appear in a pop-up menu whenever you click into the search bar, giving you one-click access to a real-time feed of those specific results. Consider creating saved searches for:

• Your brand name (untagged)
• Customer support keywords
• Competitor mentions
• Key industry topics

This simple habit can transform your random checks into a structured brand monitoring system, all completely free within Twitter.

Final Thoughts

Finding Twitter mentions involves more than just keeping an eye on your notifications. To get a complete picture, you need to use specific search queries to uncover untagged brand conversations, check competitor buzz, and find new opportunities for conversation across the platform.

While running these searches manually on Twitter gets you the information you need, juggling them alongside comments and messages from all your other social accounts can be chaotic. We built the unified inbox feature in Postbase to solve this exact problem, bringing all your comments, DMs, and mentions from every platform into one clean, manageable view. You can stop hunting for conversations and start focusing on actually engaging with your community in one place.

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