This article is part of a series announced here.

To find people to follow, you need to use the search function of Twitter. Most people would simply make plain basic searches, like this:

Look at the search results above, I have searched for the terms lose weight. The first result contains a link, the second result contains a link, the third result contains a link, and the fourth and the fifth... These people are probably also here to sell their products. They're Internet Marketers just like yourself! So obviously you don't want their tweets to show up in your search results. You need more targeted resutls. How can you do that? By using search operators. Like this:

Note that I have added these two parameters in my search query: -http and -www. The minus sign means "I do not want to have this in my search results". As you can see we have a much clearer situation now - although this is still not enough.

Now, let's imagine you want to make a more precise search, and you try searching for I want to lose weight -http -www. Which should return something like this:

I guess you can see the problem here: some of these people are talking about weight loss in some way, but they're not trying to lose weight. The 4th and 5th ones in particular are complaining about spam (don't do that by the way, you will only upset people and get banned), the last one at the bottom is saying "I don't want to lose weight"... If you're selling weight-loss products, you have a problem. Fortunately for you, there is a solution: use quotes. searching for "I want to lose weight" - with the quotes - means you want this sentence, precisely the same words in the same order.

Here is the result - I have added a couple of parameters (-not and -don't) just to make sure I don't get people saying they don't want to lose weight in any way.

You could also use the + operator to make sure all your words are included. For example +want +lose +weight -http -www -not -don't

There are other operators (for example the OR operator, you want either one of two words but not the two of them together), you will easily find the list by googling for it, but those above are in my opinion the most useful ones.

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