How to search tweets from a specific user on Twitter

Twitter has been around since the mid noughties and therefore there are many active accounts around today that have been posting for well over a decade.

These people will likely have posted thousands of tweets, the majority of which will have been lost in the abyss. However, there is a way to find certain tweets from years gone by from a specific user.

There are ways of doing this which could take you hours, but there are also ways of doing it that provide you with almost instant results.

In this article, we are going to look at a few of the methods available to you, and explain in simple terms how to get the job done. Let’s get started.

How to search tweets from a specific user – The best way

The best way to go about searching for tweets from a specific user is through the advanced search feature on Twitter.

The easiest and most efficient way to use this feature is on a desktop computer or laptop and logging on to your Twitter account via a web browser like Microsoft Firefox and Google Chrome.

To use the advanced search feature to search for tweets from a specific user, please follow these steps:

1. Log on to your twitter account.
2. Head to the advanced search page.
3. Firstly, scroll down to the ‘account’ subsection and enter in the user that you wish to search for.
4. Secondly, if you are looking for tweets containing certain words, hashtags or phrases, then scroll back up to the ‘words’ subsection and enter in your desired data in all relevant boxes.
5. Thirdly, scroll down to the ‘filters’ subsection and decide whether you want to search for replies, in addition to normal tweet.
6. Fourthly, decide on whether you are only going to search for tweets with certain levels of engagement and enter in your thresholds in relation to replies, retweets and likes underneath the ‘engagement’ subsection.
7. Finally, set your date parameters underneath the ‘dates’ subsection. If you only want to search for tweets from the past year then you are able to do that, just as you are able to search through every single tweet that the user in question has ever made.
8. Hit the search button and scroll through the results.

While this is by far the most efficient way of searching for tweets from specific users, some people may be put off by how ‘technical’ the method appears on paper.

We can guarantee you that this method is actually really simple, however, we have some straightforward, albeit less efficient ways of searching for these tweets too.

Let’s take a look at a few other ways you can use search filters to get different search results with Twitter.

Basic Twitter search

Using Twitter’s basic search tool will also allow you to search through tweets from a specific user, it just won’t let you filter the search in the same detailed way that the advanced search tool does.

This will result in you having to potentially scroll endlessly to go through all relevant tweets.

To use the basic Twitter search to go through a specific user’s tweets, all a user has to do is follow these steps. The process is the same on both Twitter for web and the app:

1. Log on to you Twitter account.
2. Head to the search bar and type in the name of the user whose tweets you want to search for, followed by the terms you wish to search for. For example ‘@joe_bloggs rollercoaster’.
3. Twitter will then bring up all tweets from @joe_bloggs that contain the word ‘rollercoaster’. It will also include other users who have mentioned @joe_bloggs in a tweet that contains the word ‘rollercoaster’.
4. You can choose to filter these results, by selecting either ‘latest’ or ‘top’ on the top menu bar.

If you know the exact phrase you want to search for, entering those specific words along with the user’s Twitter handle should be enough.

Scrolling through the user’s account

An even more basic way to search through a user’s tweets is to simply head to that person’s profile and scroll through all of their tweets.

This will undoubtedly take longer than both the previous methods we’ve discussed but if you’ve got time on your hands then it may be worth doing.

At least with this method you’ll have the peace of mind that you’ve personally checked all the data, instead of trusting Twitter’s algorithm.

If you want to search for specific tweets while using this method, then you can scroll as far as the platform will allow and then use the CTRL+F button and enter in the terms that you wish to search for.

Of course, to use this method you will need to be using Twitter for web, but this makes searching older tweets that little bit easier.

Conclusion

It’s worth bearing in mind that you can’t see someone’s tweets if they’ve blocked you from seeing them, though there are ways to see who blocked you on Twitter to work this out.

To conclude, there are a few different ways in which you can search for a specific user’s tweets, however there is one method that stands clear against the rest – using the Twitter advanced search feature.

We hope that by following our instructions at the top of this article you are able to get to grips with this method quickly and save yourself hours of endless scrolling.